(b Yaroslavl’, Nov 18/30, 1859; d Paris, Nov 8, 1924). Russian composer, pianist, conductor, ethnomusicologist, editor, and pedagogue. His father, a mathematician and astronomer, was head of the observatory near Yaroslavl′, but died when Sergey was about eight. In 1870 he and his mother moved to Balakirev’s home town, Nizhniy Novgorod, where he attended the gimnaziya (grammar school) and, from its foundation in 1873, the classes of the local branch of the Russian Musical Society, whose first director was V.Yu. Villoing (nephew of A.I. Villoing, who had taught the Rubinstein brothers). Lyapunov’s mother was an excellent pianist, and his early piano lessons from her were of far more use to him than those with Vasily Villoing, who (unlike his uncle) was primarily a violinist and allowed Lyapunov to develop bad technical habits that had to be eradicated when, on the advice of Nikolay Rubinstein, he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory in ...
Article
Lyapunov [Liapunov], Sergey Mikhaylovich
Edward Garden
revised by Sergei Saratovsky
Article
Seeger, Charles
Ann M. Pescatello
(Louis)
Member of Seeger family
(b Mexico City, Dec 14, 1886; d Bridgewater, CT, Feb 7, 1979). American musicologist, composer, conductor, critic and musical philosopher. His initial interest was in composition and conducting, and he joined numerous young American composers in Europe in the years immediately following his graduation from Harvard (1908). He spent a season (1910–11) as a conductor at the Cologne Opera before returning to the USA as a composer and chairman of the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley (1912–19), where he gave the first American courses in musicology in 1916. Several of his compositions were destroyed in the Berkeley fire (1923). Subsequently he was a lecturer and instructor at the Institute of Musical Art, New York (1921–33), the forerunner of the Juilliard School, and lecturer at the New School for Social Research (...
