Zinovy Stolyar
Zinovy Stolyar (full name Zinovy (Zalman) Lazarevich Stolyar; 21 January 1924 – 13 April 2014) was a Moldovan Soviet musicologist, music critic, and publicist. He was named Honored Art Worker of the Moldavian SSR in 1982.
Born in Krasni Okny, in the Odesa region, he spent his childhood in Tiraspol. There he attended music school and studied with the composer Grigory Gershfeld and his son, the composer David Gershfeld. In 1950, Stolyar graduated from the theory and composition faculty of the Odesa Conservatory, where he studied with S. D. Orfeyev. Alongside his studies, he taught at music schools in Odesa from 1947 to 1950, then taught at a music college in Voroshilovgrad from 1950 to 1953.
Stolyar settled in Chisinau in 1954. He taught at the E. Koki Secondary Specialized Music School from 1954 to 1982 and at the Moldavian Conservatory, later the G. Muzicescu Institute of Arts, from 1959 to 1973. He subsequently served as executive secretary of the Moldavian Composers' Union from 1973 to 1977, as deputy chairman of its board from 1977 to 1984, and from 1984 as its editor. He was also a longtime board member of the Union of Composers and Musicologists of the Republic of Moldova, a regular music critic for the newspaper Youth of Moldova, and, from the early 1990s, a researcher at the Institute of National Minorities of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova. He presented Yiddish-language radio broadcasts about music on republican radio.
His writings addressed general music theory, the history of Moldovan compositional art, Moldovan and Jewish folk music, particularly their mutual influences, as well as concerts and opera and theatre. He produced more than thirty monographs and teaching manuals. His books included A Guide to Elementary Music Theory, co-written with E. M. Tkach and issued in three editions; works on Shiko Aranov, David Gershfeld, Georgy Nyaga, Mikhail Glinka, Anton Rubinstein, and Zlata Tkach; Moldavian Soviet Symphony; Moldavian Soviet Song; Pages of Moldovan Music; Jewish Doina: Jewish Folk Music in Bessarabia and Left-Bank Transnistria; Pages of Jewish Music; and People and Time: Jewish Composers in Moldova's Musical Culture, 1930s–1980s.
Stolyar also compiled and edited David Gershfeld's Lyric Songs and Romances, prepared the anthology Soviet Moldovan Song, and arranged Jewish folk songs for voice and piano in Oy Azoy! Jewish Folk Songs. He organized musical salons, lectures, and talks devoted to prominent figures in Jewish, Moldovan, and Russian musical culture. In 1999, he received the Order of Glory of Labor.
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