Viktor Pavlovich Frayonov was a Russian musicologist and teacher. He was born in Moscow on October 24, 1930, and died in Moscow on September 4, 2002. He was one of the major Russian music teachers of the twentieth century.
He was born into a family of intellectuals. His father, Pavel Semyonovich Frayonov, was an automotive engineering specialist, Candidate of Technical Sciences, and professor at the Moscow Automobile and Road Construction Institute. His mother, Anastasia Sergeyevna Frayonova, née Davydova, was a schoolteacher. His sister, Ksenia Pavlovna Frayonova, was a translator from Portuguese.
Frayonov studied at the Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory from 1949 to 1951, and he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1956. There he also studied organ as an elective in the class of Professor Alexander Gedike. His diploma thesis, on forms in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko, was written under Professor Viktor Tsukkerman. He regarded Professor Igor Sposobin in harmony and Yuri Fortunatov in instrumentation as the teachers who most strongly shaped his professional interests.
After graduating from the conservatory, he worked briefly at the October Revolution School, and from 1956 until the end of his life he taught at the Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory. In 1956 he married E. M. Frayonova. Over the years he taught Russian and Western music literature in the performance departments, polyphony to theory students beginning in 1963, and musical form to theory students, pianists, and choral conductors beginning in 1980. For a time he also taught polyphony at the Gnessin State Musical Pedagogical Institute. He gave open lessons and lectures in Smolensk, Riga, Tbilisi, Tashkent, Frunze, Poltava, and other cities of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.
The most important part of his work was in the field of polyphony. Drawing on the writings of Sergei Taneyev, he developed his own system for the practical teaching of polyphony. His textbook for music colleges became widely known and was used in secondary specialized schools and higher educational institutions in Russia and neighboring countries. From the 1990s he also worked on a textbook on musical form for music colleges, though it remained unfinished and unpublished. His lectures on musical form, based on recorded and transcribed classes, were later published.
Frayonov also wrote articles, chiefly on polyphony, for the Music Encyclopedia, the Music Encyclopedic Dictionary, and the Great Russian Encyclopedia. The polyphony course based on his system continued to be taught at the college attached to the Moscow Conservatory by his assistants, Yevgeny Shcherbakov and Tatyana Sorokina.
He enjoyed enormous authority as a teacher. Among his many students were the composers Nikolai Korndorf, M. Yermolayev (Kollontai), Sergei Zagny, A. Safronov, and A. Semyonov; the conductors A. Levin, Vladimir Polyansky, and Vladimir Jurowski; the musicologists Irina Lozovaya, Irina Stepanova, and Olga Velichkina; and the pianists Valery Afanasyev, I. Berkovich, S. Senkov, and Dmitry Feofanov.
Frayonov was honored as Merited Worker of Culture of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1982, and he was named Merited Artist of the Russian Federation in 2003. He was buried at Miusskoye Cemetery in Moscow. A memorial plaque in his honor was later installed at the Academic Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory, and the book The Russian Book about Finale was dedicated to his memory.