Iraida Yusupova: Repetition, Sound, and Intermediality in Contemporary Russian Music

by Anders Flodin

Introduction

There are composers whose music immediately places itself within a recognizable tradition. After listening a few minutes to her music, one may think of minimalism, modernism, spectralism, or another established musical language. Iraida Yusupova is more difficult to place. This difficulty is, for me, one of the most interesting things about her work. Yusupova’s music seems to exist between several worlds. She is a composer, but also a filmmaker and media artist. Her works can involve acoustic instruments, electronics, fixed media, poetry, theatre, film, and visual art. Rather than treating these as separate artistic activities, she allows them to become part of the same creative world.

Yusupova was born 1962 in Ashgabat, in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. She studied composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Nikolai Sidelnikov and graduated in 1987. In 1998 she attended the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. Her career subsequently developed across composition, film, multimedia, and media art. What interests me most about Yusupova, however, is not simply the diversity of her biography. It is the way this diversity seems to enter the music itself. When listening to her works, I often have the impression that sound is not being used only to tell a musical story. Sound becomes a place—a space in which different things can exist simultaneously. This is particularly apparent in her use of repetition.

Repetition as a musical principle

Repetition is one of the first things that draws my attention to Yusupova’s music. At first, repetition can seem simple. A sound returns. A pattern comes back. A particular sonority remains present. But after listening for a longer period, the repeated material begins to feel different. The repetition encourages me to listen more closely to what has changed. Perhaps the pitch is slightly different. Perhaps the register has shifted. Perhaps another sound has appeared in the background. Perhaps an electronic layer has altered the character of an otherwise familiar instrumental sound. In this sense, repetition in Yusupova’s music is not necessarily about saying the same thing again. It can be about making us hear the same thing differently. This observation is supported by the work of musicologist Yuliya N. Panteleeva, whose research is one of the most important scholarly sources devoted specifically to Yusupova. In her study “The ‘Magic of Repetition’ in Iraida Yusupova’s Music” Panteleeva examines Polychordia (2001), Beautiful Willows in a Beautiful Ambient (2010), and Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (2012). She demonstrates that repetition is fundamental to Yusupova’s compositional thinking, while also emphasizing that her music cannot simply be classified as conventional minimalism. I find this distinction important. Calling Yusupova a minimalist explains something about her music, but it does not explain enough. Her repetition feels less like a mechanical process and more like a way of creating an environment.

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and musical encoding

One work that particularly interests me is Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (2012). The title immediately makes the listener curious. It suggests portraiture, intimacy, and perhaps autobiography. Yet the musical portrait is not necessarily a conventional melodic representation of a person. Panteleeva highlights a cryptographic thread running through the music, where the musical material encodes the composer’s own name: IRAIDA → ED(D=R)AEDA. This places the work in conversation with other musical cryptograms, such as Dmitri Shostakovich’s DSCH motif or Johann Sebastian Bach’s BACH motif. I find this idea fascinating because it creates two different experiences of the same music. There is the music that we hear. And there is the music that we can discover.

The listener may hear repeated pitches, textures, or patterns without knowing that some of these elements contain an additional symbolic meaning. The musical structure therefore becomes almost like a hidden text. This makes me think about the difference between listening and reading music. When we listen, we experience sound in time. When we analyse, we begin to discover structures that may not have been perceptible at first hearing. Yusupova seems particularly interested in this space between the audible and the hidden. The musical code does not have to be understood by the audience for it to exist. Its presence becomes part of the architecture of the work.

Polychordia

My interest in Yusupova becomes even stronger when considering Polychordia (2001). The work is written for pedal-less harp, cello, piano, and phonogram (pre-recorded electronic/fixed media sound). Even the instrumentation suggests that Yusupova is interested in sounds that do not easily belong to a traditional chamber-music category. Panteleeva discusses Polychordia in relation to what she calls “elemental polyphony.” Instead of traditional counterpoint, the work can be understood as a coexistence of relatively independent sonic elements. For me, this idea of coexistence is central to Yusupova’s music. I do not always feel that one musical event is necessarily more important than another. Instead, several things can occupy my attention at the same time. The phonogram is particularly important here. A recorded sound exists alongside sounds produced by the performers in the room. The listener therefore encounters different kinds of presence: something is being played now, while something else has already been recorded. This creates a subtle ambiguity. Where does the “real” performance begin? Where does it end? And what happens when recorded sound becomes indistinguishable from the acoustic sound produced by the musicians? These questions make Polychordia interesting not only as a musical composition but also as an exploration of perception. 

Music as environment

The idea of music as an environment becomes even more suggestive in Beautiful Willows in a Beautiful Ambient (2010). The title itself invites us to think spatially. We are not simply being presented with a musical object; we seem to be entering an atmosphere. This changes the way I think about listening to Yusupova. Instead of asking only what the music is “about,” I become more interested in what it is like to be inside the music. Repetition is important because it gives this environment stability. If everything were constantly changing, there would be no sense of sonic space. Repeated material gives the listener something to inhabit. At the same time, the repetition allows very small differences to become meaningful. A sound that might seem insignificant in a rapidly changing composition can become extremely important when it occurs within a slowly changing environment. This is one of the qualities I find most compelling in Yusupova’s work: she seems to ask us to slow down.

Beyond minimalism

It is tempting to call Yusupova a minimalist composer. There are certainly reasons for doing so. Repetition, sustained processes, and a heightened awareness of gradual change are important elements of her music. But I would hesitate to stop there. Yusupova’s music contains many other interests: electronic sound, poetry, cryptography, unusual instruments, film, theatre, conceptual art, and visual media. Panteleeva’s research supports this more nuanced understanding. Her analysis shows that Yusupova’s works employ different forms of repetition and organization rather than following one consistent minimalist procedure. I therefore prefer to think of Yusupova as a composer working with repetition, rather than simply a minimalist. That small difference in terminology matters. It leaves room for the rest of her artistic personality. 

The electronic and the acoustic

Another aspect of Yusupova’s music that I find particularly compelling is her relationship with technology. Her catalogue includes works for acoustic instruments combined with electronic media. She has also written for electronic instruments, including the theremin. Kitezh-19 (2004), for theremin and fixed media, is one example. The theremin is an especially appropriate instrument for Yusupova’s artistic world because it occupies an uncertain position between physical gesture and electronic sound. The performer moves in space without directly touching the instrument, and sound emerges from this movement. This creates a fascinating relationship between body, space, and sound. In Yusupova’s music, technology therefore does not necessarily function simply as a tool. It can become part of the musical meaning itself. The difference between acoustic and electronic sound becomes something to explore.

Between music, film, and visual art

Perhaps the most personal reason I find Yusupova interesting is that she refuses to remain only within the category of “composer.” Her work includes collaborations with visual artists and projects involving film, video, theatre, and other media. Her multimedia opera Einstein and Margarita and Message are important examples of this interdisciplinary approach. When music becomes part of a multimedia work, listening changes. We no longer hear sound in isolation. Images, movement, text, and theatrical action influence what we hear and how we understand it. For me, this connects naturally with Yusupova’s interest in polyphony. Polyphony does not have to mean only several melodies.It can also mean several forms of artistic perception existing simultaneously. A musical layer can coexist with a visual layer. A recorded sound can coexist with a live performer. A literary text can coexist with an abstract musical structure. In this sense, Yusupova’s multimedia practice seems to grow naturally out of her musical thinking.

A post-Soviet artistic voice

Yusupova’s career also offers an interesting perspective on post-Soviet musical culture. Her education belongs to the Soviet musical institution: the Moscow Conservatory and the pedagogical tradition of Sidelnikov. Her later artistic activity, however, reflects a much more open cultural environment in which composers could engage with international contemporary music, electronic technology, film, visual art, and experimental performance. Her music consequently seems to exist between different cultural histories. I would not describe it simply as “Soviet” or “Western.” It is more interesting to see it as a product of cultural transition. The traditional academic composer remains present, but alongside the media artist, filmmaker, conceptual artist, and experimental musician.

This makes Yusupova particularly valuable as a subject of study. Her work allows us to observe how the identity of the composer changes when the boundaries between artistic disciplines become less rigid.

Conclusion

Iraida Yusupova’s music presents a compelling example of contemporary composition as a pluralistic and intermedial practice. Her work combines repetition, layered textures, electronic sound, unusual instruments, literature, conceptual procedures, film, and visual art.

The musicological research of Yuliya Panteleeva is particularly valuable because it demonstrates that repetition is not simply a stylistic characteristic of Yusupova’s music but an important compositional principle. In works such as Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, repetition interacts with cryptographic musical structures; in Polychordia and Beautiful Willows in a Beautiful Ambient, it contributes to a broader conception of elemental polyphony. 

At the same time, Yusupova’s use of electronic media and multimedia demonstrates that her artistic concerns extend beyond conventional musical form. Acoustic and electronic sounds, visual images, literary texts, and theatrical elements can function as interconnected components of a larger artistic structure.

For this reason, Yusupova should not be understood exclusively as a minimalist, electroacoustic composer, conceptualist, or multimedia artist. Each category describes an important aspect of her work, but her artistic identity emerges precisely from the interaction between these categories.

Yusupova’s work ultimately suggests that contemporary composition need not be defined by a single technique or aesthetic ideology. Instead, musical meaning can emerge from the coexistence of different systems—repetition and variation, acoustic and electronic sound, music and image, structure and concept. It is precisely this coexistence that makes Iraida Yusupova an important and distinctive voice in contemporary Russian music.

References

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Yusupova, I. (2012). Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88XAfZFxTHA&list=RD88XAfZFxTHA&start_radio=1 [Accessed: 2026-09-07]

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Yusupova, I. (2004). Einstein and Margarita. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHRaDWVHmnw&list=RDEHRaDWVHmnw&start_radio=1 [Accessed: 2026-09-07]

Yusupova, I. (2004). Kitezh-19. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxbHI_Th2Tw&list=OLAK5uy_nS1PzRgxKWpUDrVkmaSDMs-sB6dA8D3Y4&index=8 [Accessed: 2026-09-07]