Sofia Levkovskaya
Sofia Levkovskaya (born Ilyushina; 25 November 1965 – 20 June 2011) was a Russian composer and music teacher. She was born and studied in Leningrad. She graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Music College as a choral conductor and studied composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Professor Sergei Slonimsky, under whom she also completed postgraduate study.
Levkovskaya was a member of the St. Petersburg Composers’ Union and taught composition, orchestration, and music theory at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. After completing her postgraduate studies, she taught specialist courses in contemporary notation to composition students. In 1996, she received an award from the Ketgut Acoustic Society in the United States and took part in the Darmstadt Courses for New Music.
Her work explored combinations of live acoustic sound with theatrical gesture, video, and electronics. She called her approach, and her way of presenting compositions to audiences, “instrumental theatre.” In multimedia projects, she worked as a director and scriptwriter. Her music often used quotation, sometimes nearly verbatim, and she incorporated electronically processed audio recordings into scores. She also composed music for the films Uneven Breathing (2005) and Spartakiad: Local Warming (2007).
From 2007 to 2011, Levkovskaya co-hosted the “Free Electron” segment on the program Sounding Sphere on Radio Russia–St. Petersburg, focusing on electronic music. She took part in concerts and festivals including St. Petersburg Musical Spring, Sound Paths, Earth of Children, From Avant-Garde to the Present Day, International Conservatory Week, and Music Time: Fin de siècle. She died in St. Petersburg after a prolonged illness.