Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas...

Nicolas Slonimsky was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy to a family of the intelligentsia in St. Petersburg, Russia. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, later a founder of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, was his first piano teacher. After studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he fled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 first to Kyiv, then ultimately to Paris, where his sister Yulia Slonimskaya Sazonova was already living. He settled in Rochester, New York, in 1923. After two years, he moved to Boston, where he taught music theory at the Boston Conservatory and the Malkin Conservatory, and began to write music articles for The Boston Evening Transcript, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Etude magazine. In 1927, he formed the Boston Chamber Orchestra, and championed contemporary music, which he conducted around the world. In 1931, he married Dorothy Adlow, art critic of The Christian Science Monitor, with whom he had a daughter Electra, who later edited his letters and collected works. Throughout his life, Slonimsky wrote extensively for periodicals and newspapers, produced program and liner notes, and contributed to numerous reference works. When his active conducting career slowed, he spent more time writing about music. In 1947, he published the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, one of his most influential works for composers and performers. Two books for children followed, The Road to Music and A Thing or Two About Music. In 1952, Slonimsky brought out the Lexicon of Musical Invective, a collection of insulting contemporary critiques of musical greats in their time. In 1958, he became editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and remained its chief editor until 1992. In 1964, Slonimsky's wife died, and he moved to Los Angeles. He taught at the University of California at Los Angeles for three years, and lectured and spoke about music. In 1988, he published his autobiography, Perfect Pitch, filled with anecdotes about musical figures of the 20th century.