Boris Erzakovich
Boris (Ber) Girshovich Erzakovich (12 June 1908 – 2 May 1997) was a Kazakh and Soviet music scholar, folklorist, and composer. He received a Doctor of Arts degree in 1966, became a professor in 1970, and was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR in 1967.
Born in Akmolinsk, Erzakovich worked as an editor at Kazakh Radio from 1931 to 1938. In 1932 he became the first director of a women’s choir that was transformed two years later into the Kazakh Radio Choir. From 1938 to 1943, he headed the music department of the Kazakh SSR Administration for Arts.
From 1945 he was a senior research fellow at the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR. He led its arts-studies sector from 1950 to 1961, headed the Department of Theatre and Visual Arts at the academy’s Institute of Literature and Art from 1961 to 1968, and from 1969 led the Department of Musical Arts. Between 1961 and 1987, he served as a research consultant to the folklore cabinet and taught the history of Kazakh music at the Kurmangazy Alma-Ata State Conservatory. He graduated from that conservatory in 1949 and studied with Yevgeny Brusilovsky. He also taught polyphony and arranging there from 1950 to 1952; his students included Bulat Karakulov.
Erzakovich wrote foundational studies of Kazakhstan’s musical culture. Beginning in 1931, he collected and studied Kazakh folk music, recording about 2,500 Kazakh songs and kyuis. He developed a classification of Kazakh song genres, identified musical treatments of epic and historical narratives, examined the national characteristics of Kazakh song melody, and described the work of numerous folk composers.
His publications include Music of Soviet Kazakhstan (1942), Song Culture of the Kazakh People, Musical Heritage of the Kazakh People, Kazakh Folk Song Creativity of the Pre-October Period, At the Origins of Kazakh Musicology, Folk Songs of Kazakhstan (1955), Songs of Kenen Azerbayev (1955), Musical Representation of the Kazakh Epic (1959), Kazakh Soviet Folk Songs (1959), and Creative Connections between Kazakh and Russian Music (1962). He also compiled works by the folk composer-singers Birzhan, Mukhit, Zhayau Bayzhanov, and Abai between 1967 and 1970.
As a composer, Erzakovich wrote the orchestral Overture on Kazakh Themes (1936), the symphonic poems Tulegen Tokhtarov (1944) and Sonata about Manshuk Mametova, and Little Musician, a set of 20 pieces on Kazakh themes published in 1960. His output also included choirs, songs, romances, and music for the plays Amangeldy and Shokan Valikhanov. He was named Honored Artist of the Kazakh SSR in 1945, received the Order of the Badge of Honour in 1940 and the Medal for Labor Distinction in 1959, and was awarded the Chokan Valikhanov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR.
Erzakovich died in Almaty on 2 May 1997 and was buried in the city’s Central Cemetery.