The Chief Directions of Scholarly Activity of the St. Petersburg Conservatory

Abstract

The St. Petersburg Conservatory, the oldest higher music education institution in Russia, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2012. Such a significant date provides a good reason to summarize the results and determine the prospects for further development. In this regard, the review of the Conservatory’s scholarly activities proposed in this article returns numerous times to the events of the jubilee year as one of the essential points of reference. The article highlights the academic schools, the priority thematic areas in the study of music theory, music history, folk music, the early Russian art of singing (including here the theory of fret organization, the current issues of the legacy of J. S. Bach, the study of the works of Russian composers and those outside of Russia, issues of the philosophy and aesthetics of music, the history of the Conservatory, work with archival materials, publications of sources and documents); the interaction of the scholarly and educational processes characteristic for the Conservatory is highlighted; information is provided about the conferences and symposia, scholarly publishing projects and contacts with international musicological organizations (IMS). Particular attention is paid to the sensational disclosure — the discovery at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of the orchestral voices of Igor Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, an early work by the composer, long considered irretrievably lost.

Keywords: academic schools of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, music theory, music history, ethnomusicology, the early Russian art of singing, scholarly publishing projects, the discovery in 2015 of Stravinsky’s Funeral Song