Strange and uneasy, her relation to new music, and in hindsight only growing ever more so. Which is not to say Sofia Gubaidulina did not belong to the field: she carried excellent early modernist credentials handed on from 1950s Moscow, having earned herself a censorship from the Kremlin and, in 1992, the requisite flight into Germany reserved only for those most dissident of Russian artists; she was modernity’s aesthetic refugee par excellence, writing for her world by writing against it. Certainly she belonged, not least as the first woman to hold serious international credence as a composer without the complete divestiture of her sonic and structuralist impulses; together, she and Galina Ustvolskaya shattered considerable glass. And, as among the last of a critical generation—only György Kurtág and Per Nørgård remain behind as delegates of the nonagenarians, the dwindling direct links to the decade of high modernity’s birth—she belonged as well. But the already precarious contingency of the aesthetic terms of that belonging have attenuated in her death. The work is finished, the critical appraisal mounts in earnest, and already, as Gubaidulina slips toward the past, the allegiances that permitted her music a tether to the field’s present form (beyond a simple being-alive) grow ever more difficult to recall. She is revealed in mourning as what she in truth always was, a thorny object in the mechanism of new music’s systematic self-selection but weirdly resistant to extradition despite. Belonging without fitting but incapable of being left out; where does that leave her now?
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