Elena Mikhailovna Frayonova, born Mikhailina Mikhailovna Vyzgo, was a Russian musicologist and teacher, and the creator of an all-Russian course on the musical folklore of the peoples of the USSR for secondary specialized educational institutions. She was born on April 7, 1929, in Tashkent, and died on September 25, 2013, in Moscow.
Her father was the hydraulic engineer Mikhail Vyzgo, and her mother was the musicologist Tamara Vyzgo. She lived in Moscow from 1948. In 1951 she graduated from the Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1956 she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. Her diploma work, devoted to operatic forms in Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello, was written in the class of Professor Boris Yarustovsky. From 1956 she was the wife of Viktor Frayonov.
For more than fifty years, from 1956 to 2008, Frayonova worked at the Music School, later College, attached to the Conservatory, where she taught folk art and other disciplines. In the late 1970s and early 1990s she taught a course in folk art that she had created herself. Alongside Russian material, it included the folklore of other peoples of the USSR, which made it unique among Moscow music schools.
Among her many students were the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the composers Anton Safronov and Andrei Semyonov, the musicologists Irina Lozovaya and I. Stepanova, and folklorists who later took part in the ensemble Virtual Village, including O. Velichkina in Paris, S. Kontsedalova in Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine, and O. Gnevsheva in Podolsk, as well as K. Korzun, who later became a leading teacher of Russian folklore at a music college.
Frayonova considered musical folklore in the context of general music history, a feature that distinguished her course from other similar programs. Her scholarly interests centered on Russian folklore, which she studied both in itself and in relation to the folklore of the Russians' nearest neighbors, including Lithuanian and Georgian polyphony and the epic traditions of Adyghe and Turkic peoples. One of her principal and most widely used publications was the Reader on Russian Folk Musical Creativity, first published in Moscow in 2000 and later reissued twice. It came to be used both as a teaching aid and as a collection of melodies and texts for folklore ensembles.
In her study of rhythm, she insisted that verse in folk song could not be analyzed apart from its connection with music. She emphasized the special significance for the Russian musical and poetic tradition of the folk five-syllable line, which she interpreted as a metrical unity indivisible into component parts. She regarded the synthesis of musical and poetic rhythm as an essential property of national compositional creativity. She also took part in conferences devoted to the anniversary of Mikhail Glinka in Smolensk in 2003 and Moscow in 2004.
In addition to musical folklore, she was actively engaged in organology, specializing in Eastern musical instruments, including the tanbur, Sumerian harps and lyres, ancient Egyptian harps and lutes, and the Bactrian lute. She wrote a number of articles on the music of oral tradition, folklore, and instruments for authoritative reference publications in the USSR and Russia, including the Music Encyclopedia, the Music Encyclopedic Dictionary, the modern encyclopedia Musical Instruments, and the Great Russian Encyclopedia. She was buried in the third section of Miusskoye Cemetery.