Natal'ya Semyonovna Seryogina

Natal'ya Semyonovna Seryogina, born in Novokuznetsk on 1 June 1943, is a Russian musicologist whose work focuses on the sacred music of Ancient Rus'. Her scholarship, rooted in the Soviet academic tradition and its aftermath, examines the history of Russian liturgical chant, the aesthetics of hymnography, and the relationship between modern Russian culture and that of the early centuries.

She trained at the M. I. Glinka State Conservatory in Nizhny Novgorod, where she studied theory and composition with D. V. Zhitomirsky between 1965 and 1970. She then pursued postgraduate studies with M. V. Brazhnikov at the Leningrad State Conservatory, from 1970 to 1973. Afterwards she joined the Russian Institute of Art History as a researcher. In 1975 she defended her candidate's thesis on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Russian chant and, in 1995, she obtained her doctorate in art history with a study of the manuscript Stikhirar' mesyachny, known as the Menologion hymns.

Alongside her research, Seryogina has been active in promoting the early choral repertoire, contributing to concert programming, to projects for film, television and radio, and to performances of chants she herself transcribed with a choir. She also wrote scripts for television programmes and feature films. Her articles cover contemporary and film music, although the core of her output lies in palaeography and the analysis of znamenny chant, hymns to Russian saints, and the presence of the themes of The Tale of Igor's Campaign in liturgical tradition.

Her legacy rests above all on having linked the philological study of manuscripts with musical practice and with public dissemination. Her editions and collaborations, such as those carried out with A. N. Kryukov and V. G. Kartsovnik, and the provisional catalogue of sources she proposed, remain reference points for anyone studying the medieval Russian repertoire.