Sofia Gubaidulina survived a strangling attempt in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 1973, an attack her peers suspected came from the KGB, all because of the kind of music she wrote. Born in 1931 in the Tatar region to a Volga Tatar father and a mother of Polish Jewish descent, she connected music to God at age five and immediately understood she had to hide that feeling. This episode follows her through dorm raids for banned Western scores at the Kazan Conservatory, her clash with Soviet music chief Tikhon Khrennikov, and the moment Dmitri Shostakovich privately told her to stay on her mistaken path.

We look at how she survived by scoring films like the 1967 animated Adventures of Mowgli, formed the improvisational folk-instrument group Astreja to escape censorship, and was blacklisted in 1979 as one of the Khrennikov Seven ...