Music theory à la Leningrad: an interview with Tatiana Bershadskaya

For over sixty years Tatiana Bershadskaya has played a central role in music and music theory in Russia. Specifically, she is the undisputed leader of the so-called “Leningrad School” of music theory, which arose in contradistinction to the strong influence of Moscow, and what is often called the “Moscow School,” in the twentieth century. For much of the twentieth century there was a certain tension between these two schools, with the more-famous Moscow School often outshining its northern counterpart. The Leningrad School traces its roots back to Boleslav Yavorsky, who worked primarily in and around Moscow, and had little to do with St. Petersburg. Yet both schools owe their existence, for the most part, to developments that took place in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. Beginning with Rimsky-Korsakov, there was a strong pull toward harmonic functionalism in the works of Russian music theorists. This culminated in the works of Gregori Catoire, Igor Sposobin, and others, who essentially founded the “Moscow School” of music theory in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Bershadskaya represents another Russian music-theoretical tradition, which stemmed from the work of Yavorsky and, subsequently, Boris Asafiev, Christopher Kushnarev, and Yuri Tiulin, the latter two with whom she studied. In this work, in an introductory essay, the author contextualizes these two schools of music theory, and the role that Bershadskaya and her predecessors played in their formation. After the introductory essay the author offers an extensive interview that he conducted with Bershadskaya at her apartment invSt. Petersburg, from February 15, 2018, in which she discusses her life in and her views on music and music theory.