Inna Alekseyevna Barsova

Inna Alekseyevna Barsova (born Smolensk, 1927) is a Russian musicologist whose work focuses above all on the music of Gustav Mahler and on the history of musical notation. She trained at the Moscow State Conservatory, graduating in 1951 and completing postgraduate studies in 1954. She is a well-known figure in Soviet and post-Soviet musicology for the rigour of her studies of Austro-German and Russian composers.

Her academic career began in 1954, when she joined the orchestration department of the Moscow Conservatory. She rose from assistant professor in 1973 to full professor in 1981. She also taught as a professor at the conservatories of Nizhny Novgorod (1979–1992) and Minsk (1993–1996). She earned the candidate degree in 1970 with a thesis on Mahler's early symphonies, and her doctorate in 1980 with a monograph on the composer's symphonies.

Her research covers Mahler's relationship with Russia, his concert tours in St Petersburg and the reception of his music in the country. She has also studied twentieth-century figures such as Scriabin, Hindemith and Kancheli, and has written on the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, in particular on Mosolov and Shostakovich. Her interests extend to nineteenth-century Austrian and German music, aesthetics and musical analysis. Her work on score notation relates it to the spatial discoveries of the Renaissance and to changes in the natural sciences, cartography and the visual arts.

Her legacy includes a broad body of work: studies, editions of Mahler's letters, manuals for score reading and the book Kniga ob orkestre. Her culturological approach and her attention to psychological and linguistic data make her work a reference point for those studying the relationship between music, written culture and the thought of its time.