Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, Soviet union to an ethnically mixed family of

a Volga Tatar father and an ethnic Russian mother. Her father, Asgat Masgudovic
h Gubaidulin, was an engineer and her mother, Fedosiya Fyodorovna (nee Yelkhova)
, was a teacher. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, gr
aduating in 1954. In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory wi
th Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded
with Stalin-fellowship.[2] Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studi
es in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supp
orted, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination
encouraged her to continue down her "mistaken path".[3] However, she was allowed
to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films,
including the 1968 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the un
ique Kinopanorama widescreen format. She also composed the score to the well-kno
wn Russian animated picture "Adventures of Mowgli" (a rendition of Rudyard Kipli
ng's "Jungle Book").
In the mid-1970s Gubaidulina founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation gr
oup with fellow composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov. In 1979, she wa
s blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Un
ion of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet
music in the West.
Gubaidulina became better known abroad during the early 1980s through Gidon Krem
er's championing of her violin concerto Offertorium. She later composed an homag
e to T. S. Eliot, using the text from the poet's Four Quartets. In 2000, Gubaidu
lina, along with Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, and Wolfgang Rihm, was commissioned b
y the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to write a piece for the Passion 200
0 project in commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach. Her contribution was the Jo
hannes-Passion. In 2002 she followed this by the Johannes-Ostern ("Easter accord
ing to John"), commissioned by Hannover Rundfunk. The two works together form a
"diptych" on the death and resurrection of Christ, her largest work to date. Inv
ited by Walter Fink, she was the 13th composer featured in the annual Komponiste
nportrt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2003, the first female composer of the
series. Her work The Light at the End preceded Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in the
2005 proms. In 2007 her second violin concerto In Tempus Praesens was performed
at the Lucerne Festival by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Its creation has been depicted i
n Jan Schmidt-Garre's film Sophia - Biography of a Violin Concerto.
Since 1992, Gubaidulina has lived in Hamburg, Germany.[4] She is a member of the
musical academies in Frankfurt, Hamburg and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Aesthetic
For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of Sovi
et Russia.[5] For this reason, she associated music with human transcendence and
mystical spiritualism, which manifests itself as a longing inside the soul of h
umanity to locate its true being, a longing she continually tries to capture in
her works.[6] These abstract religious and mystical associations are concretized
in Gubaidulina's compositions in various ways. Gubaidulina is a convinced Russi
an-Orthodox believer.[7] The influence of electronic music and improvisational t
echniques is exemplified in her unusual combination of contrasting elements, nov
el instrumentation, and the use of traditional Russian folk instruments in her s
olo and chamber works, such as De profundis for bayan, Et expecto- Sonata for ba
yan, and In croce for cello and organ or bayan. The koto, a traditional Japanese
instrument is featured in her work In the Shadow of the Tree, in which one solo
player performs three different instrument Koto, Bass Koto, and Chang. The Cantic
le of the Sun is a cello concerto/choral hybrid, dedicated to Rostropovich. The
use of the lowest possible registers on the cello opens new possibilities for th
e instrument while the limited use of chorus also adds a mystical ambience to th
e work.

Another influence of improvisation techniques can be found in her fascination wi

th percussion instruments. She associates the indeterminate nature of percussive
timbres with the mystical longing and the potential freedom of human transcende
nce.[8]
She was also preoccupied by experimentation with non-traditional methods of soun
d production, and as already mentioned, with unusual combinations of instruments
, i.e. Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings (1975), Detto- I
Sonata for Organ an
d Percussion (1978), The Garden of Joy and Sorrow for Flute, Harp and Viola (198
0), and Descensio for 3 Trombones, 3 Percussionists, Harp, Harpsichord/Celesta a
nd Celesta/Piano (1981).[9]
Gubaidulina notes that the two composers to whom she experiences a constant devo
tion are J.S. Bach and Webern. Among some non-musical influences of considerable
import are Carl Jung (Swiss thinker and founder of analytical psychology) and N
ikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (Russian religious philosopher, whose works were
forbidden in USSR, but nevertheless found and studied by the composer).[10]
Style
A profoundly spiritual person, Gubaidulina defines "re-ligio" as re-legato or as
restoration of the connection between oneself and the Absolute.[8] She finds th
is re-connection through the artistic process and has developed a number of musi
cal symbols to express her ideals.