Zum aktuellen Stand der professionellen Musikausbildung in Russland

Abstract

This article deals with professional music education in Russia, its peculiarities and problems. Even though many of the principles laid down in the 1920s are still preserved, the music education system is at a crossroads between tradition and the search for new ways. The focus is on a number of features in Russian music education: the continuity of three levels of education as a state system; training in conservatories not only for musicians, but also for musicologists; the large weight placed on the curriculum of disciplines aimed at fostering practical skills in counterpoint, harmonization, musical form analysis, orchestration, as well as methods of musical teaching, along with disciplines with an academic profile. Expansion in recent years was due to disciplines that reflect the needs of a new cultural situation -advertising and publishing, modern information technology, management of musical art, archival practice, etc. This opens a wider choice of places for a musicologist to work in, but such diversity leads to a noticeable educational overload for students. The teaching of performing musicians is also dominated by the principle of universalism. Pianists at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, for example, have approximately 950 hours of special (performing) disciplines, approximately 830 for the general humanities, and approximately 530 for music history and theory. The article also identifies the place of academic and non-academic specialties (folk instruments, ethnomusicology, folklore singing) in Russian professional education, the distribution of educational material and its role in ’academic’ Western European and ’non academic’ folk and pop music. Particular attention is paid to problems in the relationship between freedom and regulation in the organization of Russian music education in the 20th century and in the current situation.