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Valentina KonenRussian musicologist, specialist in Western music.
Date of Birth: 29.07.1909
Country:  Azerbaijan |
Content:
Biography of Valentina Konen
Valentina Josephovna Konen (1909-1991) was a Russian musicologist and specialist in Western music. She was born on July 29, 1909, in Baku, into a family of a revolutionary underground worker. Her father was forced to emigrate to the United States in 1921. Konen completed her studies at the Juilliard School in New York, majoring in piano. She began writing as a music critic for American periodicals.
After her family returned to the Soviet Union in 1931, Konen initially enrolled in the Oil Institute but later redirected her focus to the arts. In 1938, she graduated from the theoretical-composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. However, due to her father's arrest in 1940, Konen was dismissed from the conservatory. She resumed her work in 1944 and started teaching at the Gnesin Music Pedagogical Institute. From 1949 to 1951, she also gave lectures at the Ural Conservatory in Sverdlovsk.
From 1960 until the end of her life, Konen worked at the Institute of Art History, which is now known as the State Institute of Art Studies. She was the wife of renowned physicist and academician E.L. Feinberg. Konen authored numerous books and articles on the history of Western European and American music from the 18th century to the present. She also wrote textbooks for music schools and conservatories covering the same time period.
Konen introduced several topics into Russian scholarly discourse that had previously been absent or underrepresented. Her monographs on C. Monteverdi (1971) and H. Purcell ("Purcell and Opera," 1978) had a significant influence on generations of musicologists. Other notable works include "Theater and Symphony" (1968), which explored the role of opera in the development of the classical symphonic cycle, "The Paths of American Music" (1961), where she introduced the study of jazz into academic musicology, "The Birth of Jazz" (1984), and "Studies on Foreign Music" (1968).
