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Why ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair?

I posit that Gubaidulina assigns the flute the role of chanter in …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair. The soloist takes on the role of leading the ensemble through the musical topics which evoke shamanism and Russian Orthodoxy. Because Gubaidulina was raised in an environment in which such spiritual leaders were the targets of persecution, the sociological implications of assigning such a role to the soloist within this concerto are numerous and powerful. By taking a closer look at why she would use this piece to convey the sacred sounds of post-Soviet Russia, we can better understand the metaphorical and philosophical implications of this compositional decision.

Within Western art music since the late seventeenth century, the opposition of “individual and collective” has often been expressed by composers through concertos: a single soloist standing before an orchestra. Sometimes their music is in collaboration; sometimes it is in contention. Rising to prominence during the Enlightenment, this metaphor of “individual and collective” through music expressed the rights of the individual. During its further developments in the nineteenth century, it expressed the Romantic idea of the individual's identity and contrariness to society (DeNora 2005: 25).

In the context of both the twentieth century and the political climate of the USSR, Gubaidulina stated to Russian-American musicologist Vera Lukomsky that:

The soloist is no longer a hero in the same sense as in the classical and romantic concertos. At that time, the hero was victorious: an outstanding individual, a winner in an unequal competition. The main presumption was that the hero knows the absolute truth, knows where to lead the crowd. Accordingly, the typical musical concept was the opposition of the soloist and the orchestra, which represented such dramatic oppositions as a hero and a crowd, a hero and an army, an orator and an audience. In the 20th century these concepts have become irrelevant and anachronistic, as has the concept of the victor. In the 20th century the situation is quite different: the hero is disappointed in everything, nobody knows what the truth is. And contemporary composers need to search for new concepts, for new interpretations of soloist-orchestra relations. I too am searching (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998b: 29).

Gubaidulina’s final clause—“as has the concept of the victor”—is particularly poignant. Music, in her childhood, was a political tool: something to be heard in celebration of the State. Meanwhile, the statement “in the 20th century the situation is quite different: the hero is disappointed in everything, nobody knows what the truth is” speaks both to the reality of state-sponsored obfuscation of the truth during the Soviet period and to Gubaidulina's state of mind in 1996, the year in which she said this. For composers such as her, who had lived their entire lives under the Soviet regime, the post-Soviet sense of reorientation could surely have been an overwhelming search for answers and clarity.

The title of ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair speaks to this mix of socio-political realities and the ongoing reinvention of Russian identity. However, its direct source has nothing to do with the temporal situation in post-Soviet society at all. This line is taken from the third stanza of T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, published in 1930:

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of hope and of despair (Eliot 1974: 99).

Gubaidulina was careful to clarify that she was not expressing these emotions in music in a literal way (musical depictions of “hope” and “despair”) but rather pointing toward their deeper meaning. In this stanza, Eliot refers to the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which the Occitan troubadour Arnaut Daniel, consigned to Purgatory for the sin of lust, counsels Dante on asceticism. The stanza’s title, “Som de l'escalina” (“the topmost of the stair”), is the goal to which Dante ascends, all the while spiritually repenting from his old ways as he physically turns again and again to ascend the stairs. As we will see, Gubaidulina's choices in this concerto reflect her expansive perspective as she considers the nature of sacred sound in a post-Soviet world. She does so by incorporating two additional episodes into what is otherwise a fairly standard concerto form: a shamanic episode emulating the sounds of a Siberian shamanic ritual and a Russian Orthodox episode emulating the sounds of the Divine Liturgy.

What evidence do we have that Gubaidulina is attempting to do this? By the time this concerto was composed in the early 2000s, she had joined her original colleague Victor Suslin and his son Alexander to revive the improvisation group Astraea, with whom she had experimented in the 1970s with indigenous Siberian instruments and music-making in the style of Siberian shamans. Meanwhile, she was living as a Russian Orthodox Christian, albeit of a self-admitted  “non-ecclesiastic” sort. In her 1998 dialogue with Vera Lukomsky, Gubaidulina described her relationship with the God of Russian Orthodoxy as “unconventional,” owing in part to the fact that she is drawn to composing instrumental works while knowing her music is unwelcome within her own denomination's liturgy (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998b: 32). Gubaidulina's Russian Orthodoxy is heavily informed by the philosopher and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, whose work she began to study around the time of her baptism. Gubaidulina speaks in particular of her affinity for Berdyaev's philosophy on creativity, which at times approaches a universalist bent. Both Berdyaev and Gubaidulina's creative openness and tolerance can be summarized in one of Berdyaev's axioms, itself based on John 14:20: “Unity is not opposed to multiplicity as to some exterior reality for it penetrates the latter and creates its life, while at the same time leaving it as multiplicity” (1935: 17). Gubaidulina is drawn to “the sacred” in sound. Rather than drawing boundaries around what is “in” and what is “out” of Russian Orthodoxy, she describes how at an early age: “music naturally blended with religion, and sound, straightaway, became sacred for me” (Kurtz 2007: 15).

Form of...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair.

In the two comparisons below, I first compare the Nganasan field recording mentioned above (“Séance chamanique de l'ours”) and the shamanic topic from ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair. This is followed by a comparison of an example of Znamenny chant (“Gospodi vozvah”) and the Russian Orthodox topic from ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair.

In the “Shamanic Episode,” I propose that Gubaidulina emulates the repetitive percussive patterns of this real ethnographic recording of Siberian shamanism, the onomatopoeic singing of the shaman(s), and the form of a shamanic ritual (that is, the gradual ascent toward the moment of transcendence which happens at the end of the ritual). In so doing, she applies the textures, rhythms, performing forces, and form of the “real thing” (in this case, a shamanic ritual) and stylizes it within a different context (a flute concerto). Likewise, by using the conjoined motion, speech-like rhythms, range (of the bass flute), and monophony of Russian Orthodox canting, she creates a strong aural association—for those listeners who are familiar with the style—between her music and the music of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Music as Discourse, Kofi Agawu discusses the importance of such musical “topics.” How each listener hears the topics will be different according to the cultural background of each listener; “topics are recognized on the basis of prior acquaintance” (Agawu 2008: 43). Referring to music of the twentieth century and the various topics that can appear within it, Agawu cites Danuta Mirka’s unpublished categorizations of musical topics, which include “Russian Orthodox Church style” as an example of a musical topic recognizable to listeners (2008: 49).

Further, in this same episode of …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Gubaidulina employs a rhythmic ostinato paired with vocal-like interjections to create a gradual increase in intensity toward a musical climax, depicting the moment in which a shaman reaches an ecstatic breakthrough. Compare the “Séance chamanique de l'ours” recording at 8'45" with ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair at 14'47". In the ethnographic recording, the lead shaman and the other people assembled sing in response to one another, as percussive instruments—including bells, ceremonial garb, and drums—are layered. Eventually, voices punctuate the texture alongside the percussion. At 9'40", the texture synchronizes from layered polyrhythms to unison strokes, just as it does in Gubaidulina's concerto. This sonic phenomenon, which occurs several times throughout the ritual but is depicted once in Gubaidulina's concerto, might be considered an audible representation of Karelin's “magic action,” a physiological response to the profound connection felt by all present for the ritual as the shaman senses a spiritual shift. Compare this with Gubaidulina's orchestration of that same moment, notated below. The grand staff presents a reduction of the winds, strings, and some percussion, while the treble staff represents the brass and the rest of the percussion. The cluster chords stand in for unpitched percussion (as heard among the various drums, bells, and costumes), creating a sense of indistinguishable pitch areas. As in the field recording, we hear one overriding progression toward a faster pulse (grand staff) and interjections of mid-range instruments representing various drum interjections that themselves accelerate (treble staff). In Gubaidulina's concerto, the percussion suddenly drops out after the unison stroke at 15'06", leaving the flutist to descend from their higher plane of consciousness back to reality, much as we hear the shaman and congregants do at the end of the “Séance chamanique de l'ours” (15'20").

Piano reduction of polyrhythm in the shamanic episode of...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (14'51" in above recording). Transcribed by the author.

Meanwhile, the section labelled “Russian Orthodox Episode” takes its inspiration from the liturgical (vocal) music of the Russian Orthodox Church, as the solo bass flute emulates a liturgical cantor’s speech-like rhythms and stepwise chanting patterns. Lasting from 15'59" to 19'36" in this ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair recording, it contains a change by the flute soloist to bass flute, expanding the lower end of their range to B2, a comfortable area for a male cantor’s voice. This section evokes the syllabicity and asymmetrical periodicity of the “speech” mode from Agawu’s modes of enunciation (2008: 99). The performance practice of chant mandates a tangible proximity to the idiomatic rhythms and stresses of speech, and thus, the rhythms at play will be highly irregular, evading a sense of rhythmic pulse, with phrases of unpredictable length. Small dynamic swells and neighboring chromatic motion, meanwhile, depict the melodic inflections inherent to this style of chant. As the section progresses, the solo viola, bass clarinet, clarinet, and solo violin offer responses consisting of variations on the flute subject, during which time the flute takes up a drone-like role.

Transcription of Znamenny chant (Господи, воззвах). Transcribed by the author.

Transcription of the opening bass flute motif in the Russian Orthodox episode of …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (16’04” in the above recording). Transcribed by the author.

In my listening/analysis, the juxtaposition of what I identify as the Shamanic and Russian Orthodox Episodes creates not only a musical statement, but a political one. Gustav Mahler stylized Ländler and funeral marches into his symphonies—using different instrumentation than what was customary in the traditions he was representing—because they were part of a common lexicon. So too does Gubaidulina stylize Siberian shamanic and Russian Orthodox sacred music. The difference between these two instances is that, in Mahler’s day, no one was actively trying to subjugate the sounds of Ländler or funeral marches; they were a fact of life. For most of Gubaidulina’s life, the Soviet government—as I have detailed above—actively subjugated the sounds of shamanic and church sacred music.

With this 2005 concerto, we can propose a bold series of statements that Gubaidulina was offering through this work, as a former Soviet, and now post-Soviet, composer:

1. The sounds of Siberian shamanic music and Russian Orthodox church music are part of a shared lexicon of Russian sacred sounds which survived the Soviet era;

2. These sounds are so integral to Russian culture that they can be stylized into a work of concert music in the way that Western art music composers have stylized the regional and sacred music of their countries and cultures;

3. There is something fundamentally shared between shamanism and Russian Orthodoxy, which is evoked by portraying the leader of each episode—the chanter—by one instrument: the flute.

The next section will further discuss this final point and its ramifications.

Next Page: The Flute as Post-Soviet Sacred Leader