Mikhail Starokadomsky
Mikhail Starokadomsky was a Soviet composer, organist, and teacher. He was born in Brest-Litovsk, in the Russian Empire, to a family of physicians; his father, Leonid Starokadomsky, was also a polar explorer. Starokadomsky graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1926, studying organ with Alexander Goedicke, and completed composition studies with Nikolai Myaskovsky in 1928.
For a time, Starokadomsky gave solo organ concerts. From 1930 he taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory and became a professor there in 1947. He was a member of the Association for Contemporary Music from 1923 to 1932. During the 1930s, his organ and orchestral works were performed in Czechoslovakia, France, and the United States.
In the Soviet Union, he became widely known from the 1930s through the 1950s for children’s songs, including “Amateur Fisherman” and “Merry Travelers” (“We Go, Go, Go…”). He also worked in radio, wrote music for films, and was a music critic and writer. His books included textbooks on orchestration and the history of musical styles, developing ideas associated with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Starokadomsky’s works included the opera The Sot, several operettas, the oratorio Semyon Proskurin, a symphony, concertos for organ and violin, chamber music, piano works, romances, and songs. He received the Stalin Prize, Third Class, in 1952 for children’s songs, and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1946. He died in Moscow in 1954 and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery.