The Soviet and Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina has passed away from cancer in her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93.

A renowned modernist composer, her work often concerned itself with the ambiguity of the space in which different tensions meet – the mortal self and the spiritual divine, Eastern and Western music, conflicting emotions. Finding both points of union and disjunction between these opposing forces, her compositional voice was marked by innovative use of microtonality and chromaticism, rhythm over form and a use of contrasting tonalities.

Gubaidulina was also notable for her use of instrumentation uncommon in classical music – the koto, for example – and for utilising Western instruments in unusual ways. For Gubaidulina, the artistic process offered the hope of some repair and restoration of the broken bridge between the human and the spiritual – what she termed “re-legato”.

Gubaidulina was born in Christopol in the Soviet Union in 1931, and graduated the Kazan Conservatory in 1954, studying composition and piano, and undertook further studies until 1963.

She met the composer Dmitri Shostakovich through a teacher of hers, who told her to “continue along your mistaken path”; While her experimental approach and...