Nicolas Slonimsky

Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27 1894 – December 25, 1995), born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy (), was a Russian-American musicologist, conductor, pianist, lexicographer, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Biography Early life in Russia and Europe Slonimsky was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy in Saint Petersburg. He was of Jewish origin; his grandfather was Rabbi Chaim Zelig Slonimsky. His parents adopted the Orthodox faith after the birth of his older brother, and Nicolas was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, later a founder of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, was his first piano teacher. He grew up in the intelligentsia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he moved south, first to Kiev , then to Constantinople, and ultimately to Paris, where many other Russian musicians and his sister Yulia Slonimskaya Sazonova had already fled. He worked as accompanist to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and he toured Europe in 1921–22 as accompanist to tenor