Irina Lozovaya
Irina Lozovaya was a Soviet and Russian musicologist, teacher, and professor at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Her principal field of research was the church singing art of Ancient Rus and Byzantium, and she became especially known as a scholar of Eastern Christian liturgical chant.
She was born in Moscow into the family of the military engineer Yevgeny Lozovoy. She studied music from childhood. In 1971 she graduated with honors from the theory department of the music college attached to the Moscow Conservatory and entered the conservatory's faculty of music theory and composition. From 1973, under the influence of her husband M. G. Kollontai, she began researching the ancient Russian church-singing tradition. In 1976 she graduated from the conservatory with honors and entered postgraduate study, which she completed in 1981 under the supervision of V. N. Kholopova. She later defended her candidate dissertation, "Distinctive Features of the Stolpovoy Znamenny Chant," in Kyiv in 1987.
Lozovaya worked as a scientific editor at the publishing houses Soviet Encyclopedia from 1976 to 1989 and Composer from 1990 to 1993. She also taught at the Orthodox St. Tikhon Theological Institute, now the Orthodox St. Tikhon Humanitarian University, from 1992 to 1997. From 1993 she taught in the Department of the History of Russian Music at the Moscow Conservatory, and from 2000 she served as professor there.
In 1995 she became head of the Priest Dmitry Razumovsky Research Center for Church Music at the Department of the History of Russian Music. During these years she organized five international scholarly conferences at the conservatory between 1996 and 2014, and under her editorship the collected scholarly volumes Hymnology were published in seven issues from 2000 to 2017. She also organized the section "Byzantium and Ancient Rus: Liturgical and Singing Traditions" within the international scholarly and theological conference "Russia and Athos: A Millennium of Spiritual Unity" in 2006.
From 1994 she developed and taught the special course "History of Russian Music of the 11th-17th Centuries." She also initiated a range of elective courses that expanded the conservatory's work in ancient church music, including classes in znamenny singing based on living tradition, musical paleography, Greek paleography, Slavic paleography, introduction to Byzantine and ancient Russian art, and znamenny chant. To broaden students' liturgical and general cultural horizons, she also initiated the course "History of Orthodox Worship," which continued to be taught after her lifetime.
From 1998 she collaborated with the Church and Scholarly Center Orthodox Encyclopedia, serving as a member of its scientific editorial council, as scientific curator of the editorial office for Worship and Church Music, and from 2004 of the independent editorial office Church Music. She wrote numerous articles on ancient Russian and Byzantine church music for scholarly collections and encyclopedic publications, including the Musical Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Music, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and the Orthodox Encyclopedia.
Her scholarship was marked by a comprehensive approach to the study of liturgical chant books, combining methods of historical and theoretical musicology with historical liturgics, paleography, and codicology. A key feature of her method was the study of ancient Russian church music within a broader Byzantine historical perspective. Her leading research topic became the ancient Russian chant book Paraklit, and the results of this work formed the basis of her 2009 monograph Ancient Russian Notated Paraklit of the 12th Century: Byzantine Sources and the Typology of Ancient Russian Copies. She intended this book as the first part of a larger study, but the planned second part, devoted to problems connected with the early form of znamenny notation, remained unfinished.
Under her supervision, candidate dissertations were defended by O. V. Tyurina in 2011 and I. V. Starikova in 2013. In 2010, together with A. A. Yeliseeva, she founded the ensemble Asmatikon, specializing in the performance of ancient Russian and Byzantine liturgical chants. She was also a member of the conservatory's editorial and publishing council and actively influenced its publishing policy in the field of ancient Russian church-singing art. Her honors included the Order of Saint Olga, Equal to the Apostles, Third Class, in 2007, and a Certificate of Honor from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in 2011 for her major contribution to the development of culture. She died in Moscow in 2017.