Iosif Ryzhkin
Iosif Ryzhkin was a Soviet musicologist and teacher. He was born on July 7, 1907, in Moscow, into the family of the agronomist Yankel-David Veniaminovich Ryzhkin and Mania Ioselevna Zhitlovskaya. In 1930 he graduated from the historical-theoretical department of the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Mikhail Gnesin, Alexander Gedike, and other well-known professors.
From 1930 to 1933 he worked as a research associate at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences, later reorganized as the State Academy of Art Studies. He was also active in musical educational work. From 1932 he served as chairman of the musicology and criticism section of the Union of Soviet Composers, organized scholarly and publicistic conferences devoted to problems of symphonism and opera, and in the prewar years took part in organizing symphonic concerts in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. During the Great Patriotic War, together with Nadezhda Bryusova, he led the “Musical Lecture Series” and served as editor-in-chief of Central Musical Radio Broadcasting. From 1946 to 1948 he was deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Soviet Music.
After defending his candidate dissertation in 1935, Ryzhkin began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor there in 1939. From 1941 to 1943 he was dean of the historical-theoretical faculty of the Moscow Conservatory during its evacuation to Saratov. From 1944 to 1948 he headed the department of music history and theory at the Higher School of Military Bandmasters, later the Institute of Military Conductors. Between 1946 and 1966 he was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1966 to 1973 he was professor and head of the department of theory and history of music at the Moscow State Institute of Culture, and in the 1970s he taught musical aesthetics at the philosophy faculty of Moscow State University. From 1973 to 1989 he was professor-consultant at the Gnessin State Musical Pedagogical Institute.
Ryzhkin was the author of important musicological works on musical-theoretical systems, musical styles, musical forms, harmony, melody, rhythm, musical sociology, musical aesthetics, and the methodology of musical analysis. In 1934 and 1939, together with Lev Mazel, he published the two-volume Essays on the History of Theoretical Musicology; the chapters were divided between the two authors rather than written jointly. In the first volume Ryzhkin wrote the essays “Classical Theory,” with an emphasis on the theories of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and “Traditional School,” devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, excluding Hugo Riemann, as well as harmony textbooks by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Pyotr Tchaikovsky in Russia. In the second volume he contributed essays on Boleslav Yavorsky and Nikolai Garbuzov.
In his hundred-page study “Theory of Modal Rhythm (B. L. Yavorsky),” Ryzhkin criticized Yavorsky’s theory, describing it as extremely unsystematic and written in a confusing style. Together with Viktor Zuckerman and Lev Mazel, he developed the method of “integral analysis” of musical works, intended to decode specifically musical sign systems in their philosophical and aesthetic concreteness and generalization. The article attributes to Ryzhkin a central role in developing the ethical aspects of this concept and in systematizing types of dialectical thinking in relation to different kinds of symphonism, regarded as one of music’s most philosophically charged attributes.
He also wrote studies of the symphonic творчество of Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, and other outstanding composers. Among his later publications were works on harmony, musical form, the musical image, style and realism, the purpose and possibilities of music, contemporary music and the humanistic ideal, music and reality, and innovation within renewed tradition.
Ryzhkin’s wife was the musicologist-folklorist and Gnessin State Musical Pedagogical Institute professor S. L. Braz. He died in Moscow on May 30, 2008, and was buried there at the Vostryakovskoe Jewish Cemetery.