Tamara Vyzgo, born Tamara Abramova, was a Soviet and Russian musicologist. She was born in Lomza on April 12/25, 1906, and died in Moscow on May 30, 1998. She was named Honored Artist of the Uzbek SSR in 1976 and earned a doctorate in art history in 1970.
Vyzgo grew up in Tashkent, apart from studying at a girls’ boarding school in French-speaking Switzerland from 1912 to 1914. From 1924 to 1928 she worked in literacy schools. She studied piano at the State Uzbek Music Technical School, graduating in 1935, then graduated from the Tashkent Conservatory in 1940. Her teachers there included V. A. Zuckerman, Y. N. Tyulin, V. A. Uspensky, and Y. A. Fortunatov.
She taught at the Glière Music School and the Khamza Music School, and from 1943 worked at the Uzbek SSR Research Institute of Art Studies. She led its music department from 1947 to 1952, served as deputy director for research from 1952 to 1957, and continued there as a senior researcher. She also taught at the Tashkent Conservatory, where she became an associate professor in 1948. Her musicological studies of the 1940s through the 1960s contributed to the development of Uzbekistan’s professional school of composition.
In the early 1970s, Vyzgo began researching the medieval musical heritage of Central Asia. Her article “The Afrasiab Lute,” based on archaeological discoveries in ancient Samarkand, appeared in 1972. She was among the first specialists in musical archaeology in the Soviet Union and supported the theory that the short-necked lute originated in Central Asia. Her major books include The Development of Musical Art in Uzbekistan and Its Links with Russian Music (1970) and Musical Instruments of Central Asia (1980). With ethnomusicologist F. M. Karomatov and archaeologist V. A. Meskeris, she also wrote the Central Asia volume of Music History in Images, published in German in 1987. She received the B. V. Asafyev Prize in 1984.
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