Aleksey Muravlyov
Aleksey Alekseyevich Muravlyov (2 May 1924, Tiflis, Georgia — 22 April 2023, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian composer and music teacher. He was an Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR, a member of the Union of Cinematographers and the Union of Composers, a professor at the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music, and a laureate of the Stalin Prize of the second degree.
He was born in Tiflis into a musical family. His mother had studied piano at the conservatory in Tiflis and vocal studies in Leningrad, while his father, an electrical engineer, often played the piano at home. In 1932 Muravlyov was admitted to the special group for gifted children at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied piano with P. F. Linde and also studied music theory and composition with G. M. Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer's grandson. In 1938 he entered the ten-year music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory and began to study composition seriously under A. P. Gladkovsky.
During the wartime evacuation to Sverdlovsk, Muravlyov entered the conservatory in both composition and piano departments. He studied composition with M. P. Frolov, piano with N. I. Golubovskaya, and harmony and instrumentation with V. N. Trambitsky. In 1942, after a performance of his string quartet at an examination, the eighteen-year-old Muravlyov was admitted to the Union of Composers, becoming its youngest member. During these years he also conceived the piano cycle Ural Tales based on stories by Pavel Bazhov.
In 1944 he transferred to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied in the class of Vissarion Shebalin. In 1947 he received first prize at the young composers' competition held within the International Festival of Democratic Youth in Prague for Ural Tales. Another major work inspired by Bazhov was the symphonic ballad-poem Azov Mountain, completed in 1944 and premiered in 1945 at the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic under Mark Paverman. In 1950 this work earned Muravlyov the Stalin Prize.
From 1950 onward Muravlyov worked extensively in film music, composing scores for nearly two hundred feature, documentary, and popular science films. Among the films with his music are The White Poodle, First Date, Mumu, The House with the Mezzanine, Clouds over Borsk, Aladdin's Magic Lamp, and Semyon Dezhnev. Themes from some of these scores later reappeared in his concert works, including an Elegy for piano and a concerto for gusli duo with orchestra of Russian folk instruments.
Muravlyov taught from 1967 at the Moscow State Institute of Culture, and from 1972 to 2013 at the Department of Composition and Instrumentation of the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music. In 2014 he was entered in the Russian Book of Records as the oldest actively composing professional composer and the oldest active professional pianist performing his own music. He was also an honorary member of the International Union of Composers XXI Century.
His music attracted sustained attention from musicologists, critics, and journalists, and several scholarly studies were devoted to his style and works. According to Tikhon Khrennikov, Muravlyov's творчество was organically connected with classical traditions, especially Russian music, and with folklore, while remaining modern in spirit and in its use of expressive means. Muravlyov himself emphasized the importance of tradition, writing that without reliance on tradition there can be no genuine innovation.
He died in Moscow on 22 April 2023 after a long illness, in his ninety-ninth year, and was buried at Laikovskoye Cemetery in the Odintsovo urban district of Moscow Region.
Connections
This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.