Nikolai Slonim Biography

This is a composer, whose experiments seemed amazing even for the era in which he lived and created. This is a conductor who took up the performance of the most unusual creations of contemporaries. This is a musicologist who could extract a "square root from Beethoven's symphony." Finally, this is an expert scientist, whose research was in close connection by musicology.

He was the third of five children in an intelligent Jewish family. His father was an economist and publicist, an employee of the magazine "Bulletin of Europe", and on the maternal line Nikolai Leonidovich was the grandson of the writer Paulina Yulievna Vengerova. Aunt he had Isabella Afanasyevna Vengerova - a pianist and a music teacher. She later emigrated to the United States, where she studied such celebrities as Samuel Barber and Leonard Burnstein, but at the time of her childhood she still lived in Russia and became for Nikolai the first musical mentor.

Slonim was fourteen years old when he became a student of the conservatory. In addition, he studied the composition in a private way, his mentor was composer Vasily Pavlovich Kalafati. But Nikolai was not only interested in music, so he was not limited to the conservative education. In parallel, the young man studied at the university, where he listened to lectures in physics, mathematics and astronomy.

He was also interested in philosophy-he was the secretary of the religious and philosophical society, which was founded by Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius and Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. With the outbreak of World War I, the young musician was drafted into the army. He spent the war years in the Preobrazhensky regiment - more precisely, in his music team.

After the October Revolution - in the year - Slonimsky was sent to Kyiv, where he was to organize concerts. At the same time, he taught there at the conservatory, but this did not last long. Like many representatives of the domestic intelligentsia, Nikolai Leonidovich did not accept the changes that occurred in the country after the revolution, and did not want to stay in Russia.

In the year, he went to Yalta, where the next year he settled on a steamer going to Constantinople. The first months of life abroad were not easy: Slonimsky earned, playing the piano in a Russian restaurant. However, it was then that the first edition of his work took place - it was a play for the piano under the title of Bosphorus. In Constantinople, he lingered for a short while - already in the year Nikolai Leonidovich was in Paris, where he worked as secretary Sergei Alexandrovich Kusevitsky in the duties of Slonimsky, a game of piano was a game of Kusevitsky on the scores.

Here, under the Istenovo music school, there was an opera troupe in which he gained the first experience of conducting instructed him in this art Albert Cowts. In the year, he again became an assistant to Kusevitsky, who at that time the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and in the year, Slonim created the Boston Chamber Orchestra. The orchestra’s repertoire included the creations of Edgar Varezov, Aaron Copland and other modern composers.

In the year, this team, led by Slonimsky, carried out the premiere of the works of Charles Ives - “Three places in New England”. Neither Kusevitsky nor Leopold Stokovsky decided to take up this essay - because there it was necessary to conduct three quarters with one hand and the four other, but Slonimsky coped with this perfectly. However, in his own works, Slonimsky also knew how to surprise the audience.

So, once he created a canon for soprano and tenor, written on the ... tape of Mobius. In the process of execution, it rotated between the heads of the singers. The text for another vocal essay - “Five Advertising songs” - served ... newspaper ads. The activity of Slonimsky was diverse. In the year, his work “Music from the year” was published. In years, he concerts and lectured in the states of South America, simultaneously choosing symphonic works of local composers for publication in the United States.

In the year, his “Thezaurus Gamm and melodic turns” was published-the table of unusual extremes and chords presented in it inspired the creative search for many avant-garde composers. No less interest was aroused by his collection of critical articles “The Vocabulary of Musical Invective”, published in the year. In this book, Slonimsky convincingly proved that the rejection of the innovative surveys of contemporaries is not a distinctive feature of the twentieth century, and that the work of Frederick Chopin, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and other composers, now recognized as classics, was also attacked at one time.

Slonimsky translated into English the texts of the vocal works of Russian composers, translated the memoirs of Alexander Tikhonovich Grechaninov, participated in the compilation of the "International Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians." He was engaged in pedagogical activity: at Harvard University, he taught Russian, and in California - the history of music.

He visited his own country more than once.In the year, he visited the Soviet Union as a tourist, in the year at the opening of the music festival, he made a speech in the column hall, and ten years later he gave a lecture as part of the international festival of modern music in Leningrad. Nikolai Slonimsky passed away in the year, having lived one hundred and one year.

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