At a music conference in Sweden about a year ago, the distinguished Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel, in the midst of talking about something else, asked, "Have you seen Nicolas Slonimsky recently? I saw him in Leningrad in May. He's ninety-four, and he travels!" Colleagues tell stories about Slonimsky's prodigious feats, and they always have. Though he is now ninety-five, most of the stories concern how he is not only traveling, but working.
When I met him this past spring, the nonagenarian had just finished correcting proofs of a 521-page book that appeared this summer, Lectionary of Music, which contains his elaborate definitions of basic musical terms. ("Dictionary," he points out, refers to "saying" in Latin; lectio is reading.) He had come to New York to visit his daughter and adult grandchildren. Later in the week he would travel to Philadelphia to make a speech at a ceremony honoring his aunt, Isabelle Vengerova (1877-1956), an illustrious piano pedagogue whose pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber, among other luminaries. Back home in Los Angeles, Slonimsky, a widower, lives in a small cottage with his cat (named "Grody to the Max" after an epithet in a Moon Unit Zappa song).
Nicolas Slonimsky was born on April 27, 1894, three years to the day after Sergei Prokofiev, in St. Petersburg, Russia. As he wrote, with characteristically extravagant irony, "Possessed of 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, Herbrew scholars, speculative philosophers), he became determined to excel beyond common decency at all these doctrines."
Taking his first piano lesson in 1900, he studied harmony and orchestration at the St. Petersburg conservatory. After the Revolution he became a rehearsal pianist at the Kiev Opera; from there he went to Yalta, Turkey, Bulgaria, and then Paris, where he became a secretary to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Finally coming to America in 1923, he held miscellaneous musical jobs--first in Rochester, then in Boston. Learning to write in English, he contributed articles to Boston newspapers. He also conducted concerts of avant-garde American music, not only in the United States but in Europe. Historians credit him with presenting the world premiers of Edgard Varese's Ionisation (1931) and Charles Ives' Three Places in New England, two of the most pioneering works in the high Modernist canon.
Temperamentally an unemployable free spirit, Slonimsky free-lanced and house-husbanded around Boston until taking a full-time position teaching Slavonic languages and literature at Harvard for five semesters in the mid-1940s. In 1962-63, he traveled through Eastern Europe, Greece, and Israel, "as a lecturer in native Russian, ersatz Polish, synthetic Serbo-Croatian, Russianized Bulgarian, Latinized Rumanian, archaic Greek, passable French and tolerable German," as he wrote. For the next three years he taught music at UCLA, until put out to pasture at seventy-three. Little did he (or anyone else) think that twenty years later he would receive his first Guggenheim fellowship.
The turning point of his professional career came with the publication in 1937 of his first big book, Music Since 1900, a tome that must be seen and
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