One of the most surprising things about working with great composers is that they can find completely new sounds from an instrument to which you have dedicated your life. When I was called to perform the premiere of Repentance during Sofia Gubaidulina’s residency with the San Francisco Symphony in 2009, I had to come up with what the score called a “friction beater”, which was “a small ball of rubber or elastic plastic… fastened onto a springy, resilient steel string (e.g. a piano string)”. That prompted quite a few trips to different stores, and a lot of puzzling over how exactly one can fasten a piano string onto a small ball. But this was Sofia Gubaidulina. She hadn’t written for the guitar since she produced the two early, short pieces heard here, but in the interim she had become celebrated as the great and fearless composer that she is. The rest of the score had fantastic and unusual sounds, and it all made sense, so I figured that she must have a very specific idea here that I just didn’t get. I experimented with this ‘friction beater’ sound, and remained baffled. I finally showed up to the first rehearsal with a variety of options, which she found curious. But then she pulled out her own version, which she had brought all the way from Germany. It made a sound unlike any of mine, and in fact unlike the many devices I had hit strings with in the past. When she heard it, she smiled.
Sofia Gubaidulina has spent much time in the last ten years writing and revising the two big pieces heard here that use multiple guitars. She has clearly found in the guitar a kind of soulfulness and freedom that has spoken to her, and in each case she combines the guitars with the lower strings she frequently favours. Of the Sotto Voce instrumental combination, the composer writes: ‘It fascinated me on account of its dark colour and its potential for contrast between a muted, almost whispered sotto voce sound and that particular sort of expressivity that low-pitched instruments possess’. She has written prolifically for bass in her career, and the bass parts in both of these pieces are virtuosic and multi-dimensional. The cello in Repentance and the viola in Sotto Voce play a kind of lead, with the most searching melodic material, but one comes away with the sense that each instrument has been fully developed as an individual and a society member.
The guitar writing in both pieces is multi-dimensional as well. She writes: ‘The constant endeavour to penetrate the mysterious consonance in the guitars’ chords of harmonics is forever proving itself to be fruitless. And thus we always have to return to the darker shades.’ The guitars act often as a mega instrument in these pieces; there are chordal chorales, hard driving rhythmic sections and longer, free passages where the wheels come off. Guitar 1 has long improvisations in both pieces—in Repentance it is a lightly guided exploration of a ninth fret barré chord, played normally, plucked behind the chord, or done as harmonics on that fret; in Sotto Voce it is with a slide—and in both cases what you hear are my single take and unprepared improvs, complete with a few production noises. (David Tanenbaum)
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