Valeria Tsenova (October 20, 1960–August 17, 2007) was a Russian music theorist and university teacher. She was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, held a doctorate in arts, and was a member of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Federation.
She graduated from the music college affiliated with the Moscow Conservatory in 1980 and from its theory and composition faculty in 1985, where she studied with Yuri Kholopov. Her 1985 thesis examined theoretical problems in the work of Moscow composers in the first half of the 1980s. After completing graduate study at the conservatory in 1989, she defended a candidate’s dissertation on musical composition in the work of Moscow composers during that decade, supervised by Kholopov. In 2000, she defended her doctoral dissertation, “Numerical Secrets in the Music of Sofia Gubaidulina,” which was published as a book that year.
Tsenova taught in the Moscow Conservatory’s music theory department from 1990 and became a professor in 2001. Her books included a 1993 monograph on Edison Denisov, co-written with Kholopov; “The Unknown Denisov: From the Notebooks (1980/81–1986, 1995)” (1997); and “The Drama of the Heart and Twelve Sounds: On Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite” (1998), co-written with Zhanna Zhisupova. Her study of Gubaidulina also appeared in an expanded German edition in 2001, and she co-wrote “Edison Denisov—the Russian Voice in European New Music” with Kholopov in 2002.
She edited and compiled collections on music from the former Soviet Union, Denisov, and the work of Kholopov, as well as collections introducing composers from the former Soviet Union. Her publications also included the 2006 book “Theory of Contemporary Composition.” “The Drama of Life and the Holy Twelve: Fritz Heinrich Klein, an Unrecognized Genius” was published in 2008.