Khristofor Kushnaryov
Khristofor Stepanovich Kushnaryov (4 June 1890 – 25 January 1960) was an Armenian Soviet composer, musicologist, teacher, and professor at the Leningrad Conservatory. He was a founder of the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) school of polyphony.
Born in Simferopol to an Armenian family, Kushnaryov completed the biology department of Petrograd University in 1916. He subsequently studied composition with Aleksandr Zhitomirsky at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating in 1925. From that year he taught at the conservatory, becoming a professor in 1939 and heading its composition and polyphony departments. His pupils included Gayane Chebotaryan and Harutyun Oganesyan.
From 1944 to 1949, Kushnaryov headed the Sector for the History and Theory of Music at the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR. He developed theories of mode and polyphony and devised a method for the integrated analysis of folk music. His research made a major contribution to the study of Armenian folk music and Armenian monody: he traced its origins and long historical development, examined its connections with musical cultures of the ancient Near East and Transcaucasia, and identified stylistic and compositional features among its branches. While working in Armenia, he collected and studied numerous examples of Armenian folk music.
As a teacher, Kushnaryov helped renew curricula and methods for teaching music-theoretical disciplines and trained composers and musicologists from various national schools of the Soviet Union. His selected compositions include incidental music for the plays Tomorrow (1937), The Rose and the Cross (1937), and Shahnameh (1939); an organ Passacaglia and Fugue (1924), Sonata (1925), and Pastoral (1926); a Sonata for Solo Cello (1932); and choruses on Armenian folk themes, written between 1922 and 1939.
His publications included writings on polyphony, musical analysis, mode, Komitas, and the history and theory of Armenian monodic music, notably Questions of the History and Theory of Armenian Monodic Music (1958). He also edited several musicological publications and scholarly works. He was named Honored Art Worker of the Armenian SSR in 1939 and of the Uzbek SSR in 1943, and received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1938 and the Order of the Badge of Honor in 1945.