Anatomy of an Error

Everyone agrees that the death of the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina on Thursday was a grave loss for the classical world. But try finding a consensus on how to pronounce her name.

I received the news that the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina — pause on that name, we’ll return to it later — had died on Thursday in an email from the obituaries desk of the New York Times. I knew what was required of me. I had written an advance obituary for Gubaidulina in 2018 when she was in her mid 80s. By that time she had traded a life of harassment in the Soviet Union for a home on the sleepy outskirts of Hamburg and was beginning to enjoy real celebrity in the concert hall. Her brand of storm-cloud-rimmed religiosity was in high demand, and commissions kept coming.

I had filed my piece and then more or less forgotten about it. Advance obituaries can sit in the can for years. On the occasion of her 90th birthday, the Times ran a big profile. I remember reading it with envy: the piece, based on an interview in her home in Appen, was excellent. I would have liked to have met her myself.

But Thursday it was my turn to snap into action. I needed an official source to confirm her death and, if known, its cause. And there was the question of survivors. The obit itself seemed solid: I had gotten in lots of descriptive writing about her music, a nice amount of “color” regarding her Tatar childhood, and an incredible anecdote about the time in 1973 — after she had fallen in disfavor with the cultural apparatchiks — when she had been attacked in an elevator.

“He grabbed my throat and slowly squeezed it,” Ms. Gubaidulina later recalled of her assailant. “My thoughts were racing: It’s all over now — too bad I can’t write my bassoon concerto anymore — I’m not afraid of death but of violence. Then I told him: ‘Why so slowly?’” The attacker relented.

I got ahold of a marketing director at Gubaidulina’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, who came through with the facts I needed. A second-line editor at the Times made a few tweaks. We were almost ready to publish, she wrote, but wanted to double-check just one thing: how to pronounce the composer’s name. My draft obit had included a phonetic guide, “goo-bye-DOO-lee-na,” but she hadn’t been able to find any audio source confirming it. Was I sure it wasn’t “goo-bye-doo-LEE-na?” Could I send something to back it up?

I paused. I couldn’t recall writing that transliteration. I’m a native German speaker, and it would not have occurred to me to turn BAI into BYE, obvious though it may seem. The editor I had worked with in 2018 must have inserted this bit. And it sounded right. Although, come to think of it, I had just as often heard the name accented on the second syllable. Goo-BYE-doo-lee-na. I felt anxiety rising. The first obit I had ever written had required a correction because of a misplaced stressed syllable. (Apologies, EINojuhani RAUtavaara.) I opened a YouTube window on my computer and scanned search results for Gubaidulina.

I should point out that her name is inherently musical. The vowels stretch and purse your lips as they trace a progression from darkness to light, then more darkness and light, before landing on an optimistic open “a.” A sound palette worthy of Caravaggio, and not unlike Gubaidulina’s own music with its tenebrous death rattles and fizzing high notes. Then there’s the five-syllable meter that the Western music tradition has such a hard time with. Triple meter trips off the tongue, four-four holds the fort with dependable squareness. But counting in five is bumpy business. Nothing about it feels self-evident.

Look up mnemonics for teaching quintuplets, and you get an ambiguous bunch. “University,” “Hippopotamus” and “little Italy” all place the stress on the third syllable. But the first sound of “university” carries almost equal weight, whereas the hippo’s first “po” rushes toward the second and “little Italy” risks coming out in a slurred mess.

Online, I found a video from the Miller Theater in which the speaker rushes through Gubaidulina’s name so fast — “little Italy” style — that the the DOO syllable barely stands out from its neighbors. Still, it had the cachet of Columbia University, so I forwarded it to my editor. Next I found a clip of the conductor Kurt Masur in which he seemed to pronounce her name with a clear emphasis on the third syllable (at 1 minute 11 seconds into this video.) But his English is heavily accented, and he shortens the second u in her name so much that it sounds like the German word Gulli, for storm drain. Could he be trusted? Just in case, I passed the video on to my editor.

But while her answer came within seconds, it only threw up more doubt. “Kurt Masur seemed to pronounce it more like goo bye doo LEE na to my ear,” she wrote. “But with a very light emphasis on the LEE!”

“Hang on,” I wrote back, because I had continued my search on YouTube in the meantime. “I just found an official-sounding British voice pronouncing it “Goo BYE doollina.” I was beginning to feel a little light-headed. “Let me see if I can get the Boosey lady to weigh in on this,” I added. I fired off an email and returned to the hunt.

I thought I’d hit gold when I found a video titled “How to Pronounce the Names of Russian Composers.” In it, the Russian violinist Julia Bushkova goes through a long list beginning with Tchaikovsky and ending with Georgy Sviridov. Eight minutes in, she addresses the question that was on my mind. Goo-bye-DOO-leena. I replayed it five times before sending it on to my editor with a triumphant note: “YouTube delivers!”

But just as two people who witness the same accident can later give different accounts of what they saw, two people can listen to the same clip and hear different things. “Thanks for hunting this down,” the editor wrote back. But she added: “I oddly hear this: goo bye doo LIH na. It's honestly very soft. With strong enunciation on DOO but the elongation on LIH!”

My head started spinning. Our discussion was beginning to resemble the arguments classical musicians have about minute details of interpretation. They sometimes flare up in rehearsal with my own string quartet. How do we shape that phrase? Where is the emphasis? How can we know what the composer wanted? And who gets the final word?

It occurred to me that if someone were tasked with reconstructing the pronunciation of my own family name based solely on audio clips, they would run into no end of trouble. Depending on the language I’m speaking, you might hear me say VOLheim or OUOLheim. The “e” in Fonseca might come out clipped or drawn out. When my mother gives her name on the phone, she leans into the “da,” not because that’s how we say it, but because among the many difficulties our Portuguese-German surname presents, none throws off first timers as much as that opening preposition. Slowing it down gives people’s brains a chance to catch up.

Just then, an email came in from my contact at Boosey. “It’s SoFIa GubaiduLIna,” she wrote. “Hope that's clear.”

It didn’t sound right to me. But at this point — it was early afternoon, and tributes to the composer were popping up all over the internet — I was ready to settle for anything that could be attributed to an authoritative source. Besides, the pronunciation matched what my editor had been hearing. “I don’t even know anymore,” I wrote to her meekly.

For all I knew, the Russian violinist had it wrong. Gubaidulina was a Tatar name, after all. And what is right or wrong when it comes to language use anyway? In France, foreign names are routinely bent to fit the melody of the national language. It might sound arrogant to some. To others, it’s simply more musical. To the editor I wrote: “Let’s go with the information provided by the publisher.”

Long story short: we got it wrong, of course. The correct stress is on DOO as my first draft had noted. Complaints poured in quickly; this time, the error was fixed without an embarrassing correction.

I know people who live to find fault with the Times. I have a friend on Facebook whose entire feed is devoted to corrections in the paper of record. I wish they could see the almost Talmudic devotion that goes into getting things right. For me, there’s probably a lesson to be learned about trusting my ear more and trusting officials a little less in the future.

For now, I’m practicing the Ravel quartet for an upcoming masterclass. The last movement is written in viciously fast 5/8 meter with sharp accents on the first beat. It’s too fast to count “one-two-three-four-five” in my head. So at the risk of invoking the Wrath of God: I’m going with GOO-bye-doo-lee-na.