Dmitry Alexandrovich Blum was a Soviet and Russian musicologist and teacher. He was born on September 13, 1912, in Moscow, Russian Empire, and died on March 10, 1995, in Moscow, Russia. From 1938 to 1995 he taught at the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory and was regarded as one of the leading solfeggio teachers in Russia. In 1966 he was named Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
He was the son of the violinist and violist A. G. Blum and the pianist E. D. von Mansfeld, and the grandson of the playwright and translator D. A. von Mansfeld. In 1929 he graduated from a construction technical school with a specialization as a design draftsman, after which he worked at Mosgipromez and in the Kremlin restoration workshops. In 1937 he completed the string department of the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory, studying double bass in the class of A. A. Milushkin, and in 1938 he graduated from the theoretical department of the same school. He began teaching as early as 1936 and continued this work for the rest of his life. From 1938 he also studied at the Moscow Conservatory.
In 1937 he married the harpist Galina Timofeyevna Shcherbovich. According to the article, their church wedding in Losinoostrovsk was secret, though several musicians were present. Blum later connected this fact, since church weddings were forbidden at that time, with the limitation of his professional advancement largely to the walls of a secondary specialized educational institution.
Among the teachers Blum named were I. V. Sposobin for harmony, N. S. Rechmensky for composition, the solfeggio teachers V. V. Sokolov, V. V. Khvostenko, I. I. Dubovsky, G. A. Dmitrievsky, A. V. Alexandrov, and the choral conductor A. V. Nikolsky. He said that perhaps from his teachers he received a passionate love for the subject.
From 1936 to 1939 Blum taught at the Central Music School and, at the same time, from 1937 at the Losinoostrovsk Music School. From 1936 or 1937 he worked at the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory, where he first taught solfeggio, elementary theory, and harmony as an assistant, and from 1938 worked independently. From 1948 he taught a specialized solfeggio course in the theoretical department. In the 1930s and 1940s he also taught instrumentation and led a circle on the history of orchestration at the same college. In the first postwar years he also served as deputy head of the Administration of Educational Institutions of the Committee for the Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.
Blum worked at the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory for almost sixty years, until 1995, and from 1952 to 1977 he headed its theoretical department. Many students viewed the study of solfeggio in his class, with its high artistic demands and broad erudition, as a subtle intellectual game marked by refinement and elegance in the creative process.
His many students included composers Andrei Eshpai, Tigran Korganov, V. K. Komarov, Nikolai Korndorf, Alexander Vustin, and M. G. Yermolayev, the jazz pianist and composer Igor Bril, the conductor Mikhail Yurovsky, musicologists Yuri Khokhlov, G. L. Golovinsky, and I. E. Lozovaya, as well as a number of teachers at the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory. One important aspect of his pedagogical work was helping teachers at music educational institutions throughout the USSR through open lessons, conferences, seminars, and advanced training courses.
He was awarded the medals "For the Defense of Moscow" and "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War." He was buried in Moscow at Vvedenskoye Cemetery. Since 2016, the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory has held an all-Russian creative competition in musical-theoretical disciplines named after D. A. Blum for students of secondary specialized educational institutions.
Blum also published teaching and methodological works, including A Short Course in Instrumentation (1947), works on solfeggio written alone and with co-authors, A Systematic Course of Musical Dictation (1969), Harmonic Solfeggio (1991), and Three-Voice Dictations (1992). These publications reflect his long-standing commitment to training musicians and musicologists.