Alexander Sokolov is a Soviet and Russian musicologist and teacher, born on August 8, 1949, in Saint Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Orphaned at the age of two after an accident that killed his parents, he was raised in the home of his grandfather, the Russian writer Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov. Sokolov earned a doctorate in art history in 1992 and received the title Honored Artist of the Russian Federation in 1999.
From 1964 to 1967, he studied viola at the Gnessin Secondary Special Music School, graduating with a silver medal. He attended the theoretical department of the Moscow Conservatory’s music college and then studied in the conservatory’s theory and composition faculty, graduating with honors in 1973. He completed postgraduate study there in music in 1979. His teachers included Vyacheslav Bobrovsky, Irina Lavrentyeva, and Yevgeny Nazaykinsky. His 1980 candidate’s dissertation examined the role of sound material in the system of musical means; his 1992 doctoral dissertation was titled 20th-Century Musical Composition: The Dialectics of Creativity.
Sokolov has taught at the Moscow Conservatory since 1979, became a professor in 1993, and has chaired its Department of Music Theory since 1996. He served as vice-rector for research from 1992 to 2001 and became rector in 2001; after a term away from the post, he returned in 2009. From 2004 to 2008, he served as Russia’s Minister of Culture and Mass Communications.
His research focuses on contemporary musical culture and the analysis of 20th-century music. He has published more than fifty scholarly works on topics including music’s connections with philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, semiotics, and acoustics. His books include Music Around Us (1996), Introduction to 20th-Century Musical Composition (2004), and Theory of Contemporary Composition (2005). He received the 2004 State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and the Arts for the music-education program Academy of Music—A New Itinerant Movement.