ABSTRACT
Sergei Slonimsky is a versatile musical personality, known as a composer, a music scholar, a pedagogue, and a public figure. Slonimsky as a composer made a name for himself in modern Russian music as one of the leaders in the Soviet musical movement that came to the fore in the 1960s. As a musicologist, he has to his credit a great number of profound research papers, among them a large volume about Prokofiev's symphonies. As a music theoretician, he worked out a new system of rhythmical notation which he called "rhythmic neumes." As a Professor of the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Conservatoire, he has brought forth a school of composers and musicologists, and guided many of his students into successful careers in music, among them the conductors Vladislav Chernushenko, Vasily Sinaisky and Yuri Simonov. As a pianist, he often appears in concerts playing his own compositions. Besides, in the ensemble with the singer Nadezhda Yureneva, he took up the vocal pieces by Balakirev, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Mahler, attracting not only the academic audiences, but also giving concerts for workers and students. Being a pianist endowed with the gift for composition, Slonimsky gave a new lease of life to the old art of improvisation, still appearing in this role. As a musical figure and a member of the Committee for Nomination of the USSR State Prizes, he initiated the opening of a monument to Mussorgsky in St. Petersburg (with himself donating the receipts from his concerts for this purpose) and sponsored the foundation of the International Prokofiev Competition to be held regularly in St. Petersburg.
