Nikolai Garbuzov
Nikolai Garbuzov was a Soviet music acoustician and music theorist, as well as a musicologist, music educator, art theorist, and physicist. He was born in Moscow on July 5, 1880, and died there on May 3, 1955. He received a doctorate in art studies in 1940.
Garbuzov graduated from the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg in 1906 and completed composition studies with Alexander Koreshchenko at the Moscow Philharmonic Society’s Music and Drama School in 1916. From 1921 to 1931, he headed the State Institute of Musical Science, where he carried out research and organizational work. He was a professor of musical acoustics at the Moscow Conservatory from 1923 to 1951, led its acoustics laboratory and served as dean of its history and theory faculty from 1933 to 1948, and directed its research institute from 1934 to 1937. In 1944–45, he headed the music section of the Institute of Art History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, whose establishment he had helped advance.
Garbuzov’s research focused on harmony and auditory perception. He was the first to demonstrate experimentally the zonal nature of hearing. He argued that musical perception is not exact or point-like: pitch, loudness, timbre, rhythm, and intonation are perceived within ranges in which a sound quality remains recognizable, while allowing performers to use many shades of sound expressively. He also proposed that the choice of intonation depends on the relationships between musical sounds and on a work’s expressive and emotional content. In his account, music is performed not in fixed mathematical tunings but in a “zonal tuning” that allows innumerable intonational variants, making each performance distinct.
His experiments led him to refine the classification of musical hearing and to show that exercises can develop the ability to perceive intonational differences within a zone. He also developed a theory of the multiple foundations of modes and chords and studied Russian folk polyphony and the systematization of elementary music-theory terminology. His books include On the Polyphony of Russian Folk Songs (1939), Musical Acoustics (1940, which he edited), The Zonal Nature of Pitch Hearing (1948), and Inner-Zonal Intonational Hearing and Methods of Its Development (1951).