The BBVA Foundation Frontiers Of Knowledge Award For Contemporary Music Given To Sofia Gubaidulina

A Russian contemporary music composer has been given the 'BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge' award in Madrid, Spain. The BBVA Foundation distinguishes her works for its spiritual quality and its transformative dimension.

Sofia Gubaidulina has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge in contemporary music in Madrid, Spain on February 14, according to The Violin Channel. Together with the award, a price of €400,000 (The US $423,000) to encourage another artist to conduct world-class research and artistic creation.

Yearly the global financial group BBVA awarded people from the fields of sciences, ecology, conservation, IT, economics, climate change, biomedicine, and contemporary music. According to BBVA, the jury describes that Sofia has followed her own voice and conscience, conserving her artistic integrity even through the experience of being blacklisted by the Soviet regime.

Gubaidulina had forged a musical style that shows a broad color and sound palette and a skilled use of silence, showing the influences of Bach and European avant-garde. The jury emphasized Sofia's outstanding musical and personal qualities and describes that her works have exceptional range and quality of music.

This way, the art builds on a diversity of traditions in personal and creative ways, using a range of instruments that sometimes draw on folk music and improvisation. The jury highlights the spiritual quality of Gubaidulina's work, together with the transformative dimension of her music, ensuring it a broad distribution beyond conventional audiences for contemporary music.

In 1931, Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, in the Tatar Republic of the Soviet Union. In an interview, she said that when she was just a child it was spontaneously the music expressed itself to her.

Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, and Salvatore Sciarrino were earlier recipients of BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge in contemporary music. For this year's recipients include biomedical engineers Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna and Francisco Martinez Majica.

The mathematicians David Cox and Bradley Efron, conservationists Gene Likens and Marten Scheffer, climatologists Sakura Manabe and James Hansen and researcher Geoffrey Hinton.

TagsGlobal Financial Group, contemporary music, BBVA Foundation, Sofia Gubaidulina, BBVA Awarding, BBVA Awardees, Social Arts and Sciences