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<td width="100%"><font size="4">From <i>Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians</i><br>
Completely revised by Nicolas Slonimsky. 8th ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., <a href="http://www.mlr.com/schirmer">Schirmer Books</a>, 1992</font>
<p><font size="4"><b>Slonimsky, Nicolas</b>, Russian-American musicologist; b. St Petersburg April 27, 1894, d. Los Angeles December 25, 1995. A failed wunderkind, he was given his first piano lesson by his illustrious maternal aunt Isabelle Vengerova, on November 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, wrote out his future biography accordingly, setting down his death date in 1967, but survived. He enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory and studied harmony and orchestration with two pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, Kalafati and Maximilian Steinberg; also tried unsuccessfully to engage in Russian journalism. After the Revolution he made his way South; was a rehearsal pianist at the Kiev Opera, where he took some composition lessons with Glière (1919); then was in Yalta, Crimea (1920), where he earned his living as a piano accompanist to displaced Russian singers, and as an instructor at a dilapidated Yalta Conservatory; thence proceeded to Turkey, Bulgaria and Paris, where he became secretary and piano-pounder to Serge Koussevitzky. In 1923 he came to the US; became coach in the opera department of the Eastman School of Music, Rochester NY where he took an opportunity to study some more composition with the visiting professor Selim Palmgren, and conducting with Albert Coates; in 1925 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; ran a monthly column of musical anecdotes of questionable authenticity in Etude magazine; taught theory at the Malkins Conservatory in Boston and at the Boston Conservatory; conducted the <i>Pierian Sodality</i> at Harvard University (1927-29) and the <i>Apollo Chorus</i> (1928-30). In 1927 he organized the Chamber Orchestra 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; became a naturalized 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 Association of Composers, producing a ripple of excitement; repeated these programs at his engagements at the Hollywood Bowl (1933) which created such consternation that his conducting career came to a jarring halt. In 1945-47 he became, by accident (the head of the dept. had died suddenly of a heart attack) lecturer in Slavonic languages and literatures at Harvard University; in 1962-63 he traveled in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece and Israel under the auspices of the Office of Cultural Exchange at the U.S. State Department, as a lecturer in native Russian, ersatz Polish, synthetic Serbo-Croatian, Russianized Bulgarian, Latinized Rumanian, archaic Greek, passable French and tolerable German. Returning from his multinational travels, he taught variegated musical subjects at the University of California, Los Angeles; was irretrievably retired after a triennial service (1964-67), ostensibly owing to irreversibly obsolescence and recessive infantiloquy; but disdaining the inexorable statistics of the actuarial tables, continued to agitate and even gave long-winded lecture recitals in institutions of dubious learning. As a composer, he cultivated miniature forms, usually with a gimmick, e.g. <i>Studies in Black and White</i> for piano (1928) in "mutually exclusive consonant counterpoint," a song cycle, <i>Gravestones</i> to texts from tombstones in an old cemetery in Hancock, New Hampshire (1945) and <i>Minitudes</i>, a collection of 50 quaquaversal piano pieces (1971-77). His only decent orchestral work is <i>My Toy Balloon</i> (1942), a set of variations on a Brazilian song, which includes in the score 100 colored balloons to be exploded ffff at the climax. He also conjured up a Moebius Strip-Tease, a perpetual vocal canon notated on a Moebius band to be revolved around the singer's head; it had its first and last performance at the Arriére-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 <i>Make This A Day of Pepsodent</i>, <i>No More Shiny Nose</i>, and <i>Children Cry for Castoria</i>, (1925). More "scholarly", though no less defiant of academic conventions, is his <i>Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns</i> (1947), an inventory of all conceivable and inconceivable tonal combinations., culminating in the mind-boggling "Grandmother Chord" containing twelve different tones and 11 different intervals. Beset by a chronic itch for novelty, he coined the term "pandiatonicism" (1937) which <i>mirabile dictu</i> took root and even got into reputable reference works, including the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In his quest for trivial but not readily accessible information, he blundered into the muddy field of musical lexicography; published <i>Music Since 1900</i>, a chronology of musical events, which actually contains some beguiling serendipities (N.Y. 1937; 4th edition 1971; supplement 1986); took over the vacated editorship (because of the predecessor's sudden death during sleep) of Thompson's International Cyclopedia of Music and Musician's (4th to 8th editions; 1946-48), and somehow managed to obtain the editorship of the prestigious <i>Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians</i> (N.Y., 1958, 1978, 1984, 1991). He also abridged this venerable volume into <i>The Concise Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians</i> (N.Y., 1988); In 1978 he mobilized his powers of retrospection in preparing an autobiography, <i>Failed Wunderkind</i>, subtitled <i>Rueful Autopsy</i> (in the sense of self-observation, not dissection of the body); the publishers, deeming these titles too lugubrious, renamed it <i>Perfect Pitch</i> (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 <i>Lectionary of Music</i>, a compendium of articles on music (New York, 1988). Other publications: <i>Music in Latin America</i> (NY 1945), <i>The Road to Music</i> (1948, ostensibly for children); <i>A Thing Or Two About Music</i> (N.Y. 1948, inconsequential; also lacking an index); <i>Lexicon of Musical Invective</i>, a random collection of pejorative reviews of musical masterpieces (N.Y. 1952); numerous articles for encyclopedias; also a learned paper, <i>Sex and the Music Librarian</i>, valuable for its painstaking research; the paper was delivered by proxy, to tumultuous cachinnations, at a symposium of the Music Library Association, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 2, 1968.</font></td>
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