Nicolas Slonimsky

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For other people with the same last name, see Slonimsky.

Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27, 1894 - December 25, 1995) was a Russian-American composer, conductor, music critic, musician and author.

He was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimsky in St Petersburg. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, was his first piano teacher. He emigrated to the United States in 1923.

Slonimsky was a great champion of contemporary music. He conducted the world premieres of Edgard Varèse's Ionisation for thirteen percussionists in 1933; of Charles Ives' Three Places in New England in 1931; and various other works.

In 1958, Slonimsky took over the supervision of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and worked as head editor until 1992. He also wrote Music Since 1900, a survey of almost every important musical event in the 20th century and The Lexicon of Musical Invective, a compilation of hilariously bad reviews by critics of composers since Beethoven's time. One of his best-known books is the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (ISBN 0-8256-1449-X), which has influenced many jazz musicians and composers (including jazz legend John Coltrane and the notable contemporary composer John Adams).

During 1986, Slonimsky made frequent Saturday afternoon visits to appear on the Doug Ordunio show, heard over KFAC-FM, Los Angeles. During one of the shows, a crew came out from the New York public television station, WNET, to film the entire show. Portions of this session were included in the "Aging" segment of the PBS Series "The Mind". Slonimsky possessed a sly sense of humor, a trait he would exhibit on the various appearances he made on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Late in life, he became a good friend of Frank Zappa, avant-garde rock guitarist and composer. He died at age 101.

Slonimsky's notable students include Cynthia Tse Kimberlin. He left a superb auto-biography, "Perfect Pitch" (ISBN 0-1931-5155-3), filled with lively anecdotes about a great range of music figures of the 20th century, including his mentor, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Igor Stravinsky, and many others.