The Chanting Flute: Uncovering Russian Orthodox and Shamanic Sounds in Sofia Gubaidulina's ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (2005)

Phoebe Grace Robertson

In the early years of the Soviet era, the music of two Russian faith traditions was forced into the shadows. Siberian shamans preserved chants and folk knowledge despite intense persecution, and Russian Orthodox monks preserved early forms of plainchant in remote monasteries away from the watchful eye of the government. Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), herself a member of the richly-historied and often-marginalized Tatar people, became a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian in the 1960s. During the 1970s, she began performing improvisations with her ensemble Astraea, familiarizing herself with many instruments used by Siberian shamans. Her references to shamanism continued to increase among her concert-hall compositions over the following decades. As a new generation began to embrace the freedom to part from state-sponsored atheism during the 1990s and 2000s, shamanic chanting and Russian Orthodox Znamenny chant experienced a renaissance of practice and scholarly interest. Gubaidulina responded with her music: in her 2005 flute concerto …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Gubaidulina’s flute soloist takes on the role of chanter. Drawing on Tia DeNora’s research in the sociology of concerto forms, Kofi Agawu’s framework of musical “topics,” and the composer’s own reflections on the concerto metaphor, this article analyzes how Gubaidulina frames the solo flutist as Siberian shaman and Russian Orthodox cantor within subsequent episodes of this concerto. In this way, the soloist “speaks” through the music of these faith traditions that remained underground for much of Gubaidulina’s adult life. …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair is a flute concerto deserving of its title, demonstrating the dynamic potential of works by post-Soviet composers to contend with the sociological tensions that affect any individual whose cultural, ethnic, or spiritual identity has been the target of discriminatory policies.

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A Creative Utopia?

Gubaidulina’s life has been filled with the experience of opposition: East and West, her Tatar and Russian identities, compliance with the authoritarian regime in which she was raised and an intrinsic rebellious authenticity to self. This is not a rebellion for the sake of rebellion alone; this is a soul that was in search of transcendence from her earliest moments on Earth.

In …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Gubaidulina’s solo flutist takes on a post-Soviet search for meaning through sound. The soloist takes on the role of chanter in two distinct Russian spiritual musical idioms: the sounds of Siberian shamanism and the sounds of Russian Orthodox chant. By abstracting these styles and bringing them into a solo concerto, she explores quandaries that she, as a post-Soviet woman, identified in 1996. In Gubaidulina’s own words about the individual-and-collective imagery traditionally conveyed by the concerto form and its loss of meaning due to twentieth-century disillusionment: “nobody knows what the truth is” (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998b: 29). The flute, in its position as chanter in the Siberian shamanic episode and Russian Orthodox episode, is a musical representation of the reclamation of voice—the renaissance of spiritual music-making in the public sphere—that arrived with post-Sovietism. The order and juxtaposition of these episodes expresses Gubaidulina’s own self-professed “non-ecclesiastic” worldview, as she portrays shamanism and Christianity through the voice of the same solo instrument, thus unifying them into one intercessory arc. Gubaidulina’s disillusionment with the concerto form, informed by her experiences with state disinformation during the Soviet era, brings her to a state of openness toward a continued search for truth. In this post-Soviet reading of her flute concerto, the flutist—as a stand-in for the individual—finally has the opportunity to seek for themselves and find non-conventional answers. In a sense, this concerto represents Gubaidulina’s creative utopia.

Of course, as we know, modern-day Russia has not reached this utopic vision of artistic searching. Nor has Gubaidulina remained in Russia; since 1992, she has been based in the village of Appen near Hamburg, Germany. Yet her identity is still firmly one of a composer who lived the first sixty years of her life in Soviet Russia, spanning the totality of the Cold War, and who was personally threatened and sanctioned for the style of her compositions, the illicit import of artistic documents, and the company she kept. New divides between Russia and the rest of the Global North have emerged throughout the early twenty-first century, particularly following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has likened the invasion of Ukraine to a holy war (Busby and Burke 2024: 8). However, some clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church have put themselves at great personal risk to publicly oppose the war, with hundreds of priests signing a letter to Patriarch Kirill in March 2022 (Brylov, Kalenychenko and Kryshtal 2023: 23–24). Western news outlets have reported on police surveillance of Russian Orthodox clergy such as Ioann Burdin of the village of Nikolskoye, who was fined 35,000 rubles for “discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” (Jenkins 2022). Meanwhile, the environmental and cultural concerns of indigenous Siberian peoples are being overridden by Moscow (Peers and Kolodeznikova 2015: 248).

In light of this darkness, it may seem naïve to turn to a 2005 flute concerto for answers, and this is not what I propose. What I believe we can learn from …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair is related to the complex and evolving nature of sacred sounds in Russia. These sounds have existed for centuries and have proven themselves to be resilient to the tides of change of the last 100 years. Through allusions to shamanic and Russian Orthodox music in this concerto, Gubaidulina shows that sacred sounds—chants and music that point toward the transcendent that lasts beyond the realm of temporal governments—are an integral part of the musical landscape of the land we call Russia and will endure beyond changes of government, pointing instead to forces that unify us all.

Sofia Gubaidulina died in Appen, Germany on March 13th, 2025. This article was prepared for publication prior to the announcement of her passing. The author wishes to express deep gratitude for Ms. Gubaidulina’s life and music.

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Phoebe Grace Robertson - The Chanting Flute: Uncovering Russian Orthodox and Shamanic Sounds in Sofia Gubaidulina's ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (2005) - 2025