String Trio

‘Sofia Gubaidulina's string trio from 1988 is dedicated to the memory of the writer Boris Pasternak. Commissioned by Radio France, the work was premiered in Paris in 1989 by the Moscow String Quartet. The musicologist and author of a biography of Shostakovich, Laurel Fay, a respected historian of music in the USSR, writes about the string trio: ‘Since the mid-1980s, a central concern in Gubaidulina's compositions has been the “rhythm of form”. She used Fibonacci and other additive series to regulate the temporal proportions of her music on many levels, including the number or duration of notes or beats, the length of melodic phrases, the relationship of sections and increasingly deeper levels. [In a Fibonacci series, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.] Her string trio represents an early phase in her ongoing work on proportions.’