Anatoly Butskoy
Anatoly Butskoy (1892–1965) was a Soviet musicologist, composer, and teacher. He was born in the village of Rossoshnovo in Oryol Governorate. He earned a doctorate in arts in 1943 and held the title of professor.
In 1913, he graduated from the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama School, where he studied piano and music theory with Mykola Lysenko, Alexander Dobkevich, and Georgy Lyubomirsky. He graduated from the physics and mathematics faculty of St. Vladimir University in 1915, then studied composition at the Kyiv Conservatory from 1916 to 1918 with Reinhold Glière and Boleslav Yavorsky.
Butskoy helped organize the Kyiv Music and Drama Institute in 1918. He led the institute from 1920 to 1924 and taught piano and composition there. From 1925 he taught at the Leningrad Conservatory; from 1935 he was a professor and dean of its instructor-training faculty. His students included musicologists Serhiy Pavlyuchenko and Oleksandr Ostrovsky, and composers Hryhoriy Veryovka, Hryhoriy Litinsky, and Leonid Entelis.
He wrote music for productions of Georg Kaiser’s Gas and Upton Sinclair’s Jimmy Higgins at the Berezil Theatre in 1923, Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1924, and Prosper Mérimée’s The Jacquerie in 1925, the last in collaboration with Mikhail Verykivsky. His books include Direct Data of Music: An Introduction to Music (1925) and The Structure of a Musical Work: Theoretical Foundations for the Analysis of Musical Works (1948). He also wrote memoirs about Mykola Lysenko and was a member of the Mykola Leontovych Music Society.