Slonimsky, Nicolas (actually, Nikolai Leonidovich)

Slonimsky, Nicolas (actually, Nikolai Leonidovich ), legendary Russian-born American musicologist of manifold endeavors, uncle of Sergei (Mikhailovich) Slonimsky; b. St. Petersburg, April 27, 1894; d. Los Angeles, Dec. 25, 1995. A self-described failed Wunderkind, he was given his first piano lesson by his illustrious maternal aunt Isabelle Vengerova , on Nov. 6, 1900, according to the old Russian calendar. Possessed by inordinate ambition, aggravated by the endemic intellectuality of his family of both maternal and paternal branches (novelists, revolutionary poets, literary critics, university professors, translators, chessmasters, economists, mathematicians, inventors of useless artificial languages, Hebrew scholars, speculative philosophers), he became determined to excel beyond common decency in all these doctrines. As an adolescent, he wrote out his future biography accordingly, setting down his death date as 1967, but survived. He enrolled in the St. Petersburg Cons. and studied harmony and orchestration with Kalafati and Maximilian Steinberg. He also tried unsuccessfully to engage in Russian journalism. After the Revolution, he made his way south. He was a rehearsal pianist at the Kiev Opera, where he took some composition lessons with Glière (1919), and then in Yalta (1920), where he earned his living as a piano accompanist to displaced Russian singers, and as an instructor at a dilapidated Yalta Cons. He thence proceeded to Turkey, Bulgaria, and Paris, where he became secretary and piano-pounder to Serge Koussevitzky. In 1923 he went to the U.S. and became coach in the opera dept. of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where he took an opportunity to study some more composition with the visiting prof. Selim Palmgren, and conducting with Albert Coates. In 1925 he was again with Koussevitzky in Paris and Boston, but was fired for insubordination in 1927. He learned to speak polysyllabic English and began writing music articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Christian Science Monitor and ran a monthly column of musical anecdotes of questionable authenticity in Etude magazine. He also taught theory at the Maikin Cons. in Boston and at the Boston Cons. Slonimsky conducted the Pierian Sodality at Harvard Univ. (1927–29) and the Apollo Chorus (1928–30). In 1927 he organized the Chamber Orch. of Boston with the purpose of presenting modern works; with it he gave first performances of works by Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, and others. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1931. In 1931–32 he conducted special concerts of modern American, Cuban, and Mexican music in Paris, Berlin, and Budapest under the auspices of the Pan-American Assn. of Composers, producing a ripple of excitement; he repeated these programs at his engagements with the Los Angeles Phil. (1932) and at the Hollywood Bowl (1933), which created such consternation that his conducting career came to a jarring halt. From 1945 to 1947 he was, by accident (the head of the dept. had died of a heart attack), lecturer in Slavonic languages and literatures at Harvard Univ. In 1962–63 he traveled in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Israel under the auspices of the Office of Cultural Exchange at the U.S. State Dept., as a lecturer in native Russian, ersatz Polish, synthetic Serbo-Croatian, Russianized Bulgarian, Latinized Romanian, archaic Greek, passable French, and tolerable German. Returning from his multinational travels, he taught variegated musical subjects at the Univ. of Calif, at Los Angeles, but was irretrievably retired after a triennial service (1964–67), ostensibly owing to irreversible obsolescence and recessive infantiloquy. However, disdaining the inexorable statistics of the actuarial tables, he continued to agitate and even gave long-winded lecture-recitals in institutions of both dubious and non-dubious learning. In 1987 he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1991 he was inducted as an honorary member of the American Academy and Inst. of Arts and Letters for his manifold contributions to music. As a composer, he cultivated miniature forms, usually with a gimmick, e.g., Studies in Black and White in “mutually exclusive consonant counterpoint” for Piano (1928; orchestrated as Piccolo Divertimento; Los Angeles Phil. New Music Group, Oct. 17, 1983), a song cycle, Gravestones, to texts from tombstones in an old cemetery in Hancock, N.H. (1945), and Minitudes, a collection of 50 quaquaversal piano pieces (1971–77). His only decent orch. work is My Toy Balloon (1942), a set of variations on a Brazilian song, which includes in the score 100 colored balloons to be exploded f f f at the climax. He also conjured up a Möbius Strip-Tease, a perpetual vocal canon notated on a Möbius band to be revolved around the singer’s head; it had its first and last performance at the Arrière-Garde Coffee Concert at UCLA on May 5, 1965, with the composer officiating at the piano non-obbligato. A priority must be conceded to him for writing the earliest singing commercials to authentic texts from the Saturday Evening Post advertisements, among them Make This a Day of Pepsodent, No More Shiny Nose, and Children Cry for Castoria (1925). More “scholarly,” though no less defiant of academic conventions, is his Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), an inventory of all conceivable and inconceivable tonal combinations, culminating in a mind-boggling “Grandmother Chord” containing 12 different tones and 11 different intervals. Beset by a chronic itch for novelty, he coined the term “pandiatonicism” (1937), which, mirabile dictu, took root and even got into reputable reference works, including the 15^th ed. of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his quest for trivial but not readily accessible information, Slonimsky blundered into the muddy field of musical lexicography. He publ, the now-classic Music since 1900, a chronology of musical events, which actually contains some beguiling serendipities (N.Y., 1937; 5^th ed., rev., 1994), took over the vacated editorship (because of the predecessor’s sudden death during sleep) of Thompson’s International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (4^th to 8^th eds., 1946–58), and accepted the editorship of the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th eds. of the prestigious Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (N.Y., 1958, 1978, 1984, 1992). He also abridged this venerable vol. into The Concise Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (N.Y., 1988). In 1978 he mobilized his powers of retrospection in preparing an autobiography, Failed Wunderkind, subtitled Rueful Autopsy (in the sense of self- observation, not dissection of the body); the publishers, deeming these titles too lugubrious, renamed it Perfect Pitch (N.Y., 1988). He also translated Boris de Schloezer’s biography of Scriabin from the original Russian (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), which was followed by his Lectionary of Music, a compendium of articles on music (N.Y., 1988). His other writings include Music of Latin America (N.Y., 1945; several reprints; also in Spanish, Buenos Aires, 1947); The Road to Music, ostensibly for children (N.Y., 1947); A Thing or Two about Music (N.Y., 1948; inconsequential; also lacking an index); Lexicon of Musical Invective, a random collection of pejorative reviews of musical masterpieces (N.Y., 1952); numerous articles for encyclopedias; also a learned paper, Sex and the Music Librarian, valuable for its painstaking research; the paper was delivered by proxy, to tumultuous cachinnations, at a symposium of the Music Library Assn., at Chapel Hill, N.C., Feb. 2, 1968. R. Kostelanetz ed. a collection of his Writings as Nicolas Slonimsky: The First Hundred Years (N.Y., 1994). His much-lamented death, just 4 months before his 102^nd birthday, brought to a close one of the most remarkable careers in the annals of 20^th century music

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire