SFist Interviews Sofia Gubaidulina

We'll paraphrase, since she spoke with a translator, but "she devised her own system to indicate to the French horn player where there is a section where they should play natural without adjusting their lip, and with another symbol where they stop." She showed us the little rectangular signs on the score. The horns of course can play the natural tones.

She explained: "In certain instruments, in strings for instance, or in French horns, they can produce all the overtones. These are the natural overtones. The further you go up the overtone row, they less they coincide. The 11th step is particularly dissonant, almost like a quarter tone dissonant. You'll hear it in the piece," she promised. She finds "great conflict and pain in that dissonance." She added: "in the most important section of the piece, the duet between the French horn and the cello, they're playing the same tune basically. The horn plays natural, the cello is playing it tempered. There is a great dissonance between the two.

After the duet, there is a very tragic episode, where the orchestra is relating this tragedy. After which it resolves in a perfect natural consonance. It is pure and chordal. At that point, the strings are only playing natural pitches. What is achieved is both purity and equality. And that is the light!"

Kurt Masur conducts the orchestra, and what tips she had for him? The thing she wanted to point out to him is, that culminating moment, he should not make it a tragic culmination. She wanted to emphasize the contrast between absolute pain and absolute light, so that he could bring that out.

"It took her a while to convince him," she says, "he did not immediately go with the 11th natural, why it should be so dissonant. When they did the premiere in Boston, the French horn's natural reaction was to correct the pitch, to adjust to the tempered tone. When she asked Masur later why did he keep correcting the pitch, he said he was embarrassed, he was being shy. He thought people would think he was playing the wrong note."

We can tell you the SF Symphony played it right on Wednesday night, creating more of a reverberation than a dissonance in that specific passage. Also, her piece was a perfect match for the Bruckner 4th symphony, which builds itself upon a simple interval from the natural scale, a dominant-tonic-dominant motive (Bruckner is subversive as well in inverting the resolution: the interval keeps opening up, but never closes). Both pieces are patiently constructed, with the cautious development of steady, ineluctable progressions. It's musically clever programming.

The Gubaidulina festival includes the premiere of a new chamber piece on Sunday, and the beautiful Anne-Sophie Mutter in Sofia's violin concerto, "In tempus praesens" next week. We'll have more on that!