«The Uprise of a texture». The Aspects of Pitch and Mode in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Partita «Seven Words»

The paper considers the specifics of tonal system in one of the outstanding works by Sofia Gubaidulina Seven Words for cello, button accordion and strings (1982). The grammar of the musical idiom is not set initially, but is recognized gradually, as if emerging from the structure of the whole piece. As a result, the mode on a higher level, or meta-mode (if one could call it that), takes shape which is revealed to the listener only by way of retrospective synthesis