Nicolas Slonimsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicolas Slonimsky died on the 25th of December 1995 in Los Angeles, at the age of 101. He had spent the last decade of his life celebrating that improbable longevity with a characteristic mix of wit and industry. For his 98th birthday, he traveled back to Saint Petersburg to take part in a music festival in the city where he had been born a century before. A documentary about his life, A Touch of Genius, was broadcast on his 100th birthday. He had already published an autobiography, contributed to reference works spanning decades, and become a frequent guest on radio and television. He was still spelling out his name for new audiences: "Slonimsky. S-L-O as in 'slow', N-I-M as in 'nimble', S-K-Y as in 'sky'."

  This was a man born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy in Saint Petersburg, who would become a conductor championing the most controversial music of the 20th century, a lexicographer whose 1947 book on scales and melodic patterns was still in print 60 years later, and an editor who shaped the most authoritative dictionary of musicians in the English language. How did a Jewish child baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, whose first piano teacher was an aunt who helped found Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, end up presiding at the premiere of a piece scored for thirteen percussionists? And how did a conductor who received mixed reviews at the Hollywood Bowl become one of John Coltrane's most prized reference points?

• 2. Saint Petersburg to Rochester

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  Slonimsky grew up inside Russia's intellectual class, in a family where learning and art were constants. His grandfather was Rabbi Chaim Zelig Slonimsky. His parents converted to Orthodox Christianity, and Nicolas was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, was his first piano teacher; she would later become a founder of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music.

  The Russian Revolution of 1917 set the family's geography in motion. Slonimsky moved south, first to Kiev, then to Constantinople, and finally to Paris, where his sister Yulia Slonimskaya Sazonova and many Russian musicians had already gathered. He found work as accompanist to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and in 1921-22 he toured Europe accompanying the tenor Vladimir Rosing. That working relationship opened the door to America. In 1923, Rosing was appointed director of opera at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and brought Slonimsky with him.

  Slonimsky's younger brother, Mikhail, stayed in Russia and became an author. His nephew, Sergei Slonimsky, became a composer. The family produced writers, musicians, and scholars across continents and generations, but Nicolas would build his life in the new world.

• 3. A Champion of New Music

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  In Rochester, Slonimsky studied composition and conducting with Albert Coates and Eugene Goossens, and accompanied Rosing at recitals including a performance at Carnegie Hall in October 1924. He then moved to Boston, where Koussevitzky had taken the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Slonimsky returned to his role as Koussevitzky's pianist, now also serving as his bilingual secretary. He taught music theory at the Boston Conservatory and the Malkin Conservatory, and began writing music articles for The Boston Evening Transcript, The Christian Science Monitor, and the magazine The Etude.

  In 1927 he formed the Boston Chamber Orchestra, soliciting music from living composers. That project brought him into the circle of Henry Cowell and Charles Ives. Slonimsky became the conductor who took their work seriously when few others would. He led the world premiere of Ives' Three Places in New England in 1931, performed at New York's Town Hall. In 1933 he conducted the world premiere of Edgard Varese's Ionisation, a piece scored for thirteen percussionists.

  In 1932 he organized a series of concerts in Havana featuring Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, Amadeo Roldan, and Alejandro Garcia Caturla. He then traveled to Paris, Berlin, and Budapest for further concerts. He described conducting at the time as "the nearest approximation to music in motion." The tours won enough notice that he was invited to give five concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1933, though the reception there was mixed. In 1931 he had married Dorothy Adlow, art critic of The Christian Science Monitor; they wed in Paris with Varese as best man.

• 4. The Thesaurus and Its Afterlife

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  In 1947, Slonimsky published the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. For years the book was largely ignored after its publication. Then something changed. Jazz musicians began passing it among themselves. Quincy Jones said in a February 2018 interview: "Every time I used to see Coltrane, he'd have Nicolas Slonimsky's book." The list of musicians who drew on it grew to include Allan Holdsworth, John Coltrane, Frank Zappa, Paul Grabowsky, and Steve Rochinski. The book remained in print 60 years after it first appeared.

  The Thesaurus was one anchor of a wider output that Slonimsky described through a word he adopted as his own: "diaskeuast," from the Greek, meaning a reviser or interpolator. He wrote program and liner notes, contributed to reference works, and produced the chronology Music Since 1900. After traveling in Latin America he wrote Music of Latin America, the first thorough coverage of that subject in English. His two children's books, The Road to Music and A Thing or Two About Music, mixed jokes, anecdotes, and puzzles.

  The Lexicon of Musical Invective followed in 1953. Its subtitle captured the spirit exactly: "Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven's Time." It collected the most hilariously scathing contemporary reviews ever written about composers who are now regarded as giants, preserving a record of how wrong critics could be at the moment of creation.

• 5. Baker's and the Late Career

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  In 1958, Slonimsky became editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, a post he held until 1992. He built a reputation for factual accuracy over those decades, maintaining the standard of a reference work musicians and scholars could trust.

  When his wife Dorothy died in 1964, he moved to Los Angeles. He taught at UCLA for three years. He became a regular guest on radio and television, including appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. New York public television station WNET filmed him for the "Aging" segment of the PBS series The Mind.

  He became a friend of Frank Zappa, and in 1981 performed some of his own compositions at a Zappa concert in Santa Monica, California. He named his cat Grody-to-the-Max, a phrase he learned from Zappa's daughter Moon Zappa.

  In 1988 he published his autobiography, Perfect Pitch, full of anecdotes about 20th-century musical figures including his mentors and colleagues. His daughter Electra later edited his letters and collected works, including Dear Dorothy, a volume of his letters to Dorothy Adlow published in 2012. His papers now rest in the Library of Congress, where the range of his correspondence and output across more than a century remains available to researchers.