Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27 [O.S. April 15] 1894 – December 25, 1995), born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy (Russian: Никола́й Леони́дович Слoнимский), was a Russian-born American musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
For other people with the same last name, see Slonimsky.Biography[edit]
Early life in Russia and Europe[edit]
Slonimsky was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy in Saint Petersburg. He was of Jewish origin; his grandfather was Rabbi Chaim Zelig Slonimsky. His parents adopted the Orthodox faith after the birth of his older brother, and Nicolas was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.[1] His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, later a founder of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, was his first piano teacher.
He grew up in the intelligentsia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he moved south, first to Kyiv, then to Constantinople, and ultimately to Paris, where many other Russian musicians and his sister Yulia Slonimskaya Sazonova[2] had already fled. He worked as accompanist to conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and he toured Europe in 1921–22 as accompanist to tenor Vladimir Rosing. In 1923, Rosing became director of opera at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and he invited Slonimsky to join him.
Slonimsky's younger brother, Mikhail, remained in Russia and became an author. His nephew, Sergei Slonimsky, became a composer.