Reyn Genrikhovich Laul

Reyn Genrikhovich Laul (Tallinn, 20 March 1939) is an Estonian musicologist and composer whose work straddles the theory of musical analysis and composition. His name is associated above all with the study of the music of the Second Viennese School, particularly Schoenberg, and with the promotion of that repertoire in the Soviet Union, where the subject was rarely taken up.

He trained at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied musicology with A. G. Shnitke, graduating in 1964, and composition with V. N. Salmanov, with whom he completed his studies in 1967. In 1970 he joined the music theory department of the same conservatory as a lecturer; he was promoted to senior lecturer in 1983 and to professor in 1993. In 1972 he obtained the degree of Kandidat with a dissertation on Schoenberg's compositional style and technique, which was probably the first of its kind written in the Russian Federation. The defence posed difficulties for him, and in response he composed the Cantata for baritone and piano, dated 1973 and revised in 1997, whose text is taken from a commentary on his own dissertation. In 1990 he received his doctorate with a work on the logical functions of the motif in the process of formal development.

His compositional output includes variations for chamber orchestra and a concerto for string orchestra, both from 1967, a symphony from 1973, the orchestral work Musica trista in memory of Shostakovich (1976), three piano sonatas, a sonata for violin and piano from 1965 and a string quartet from 1981. These scores show the influence of Central European music of the first half of the twentieth century, above all that of Schoenberg and Hindemith. From 1969 he was a member of the Union of Composers of the Russian Federation.

As a researcher, he left an extensive body of writing on analysis, form and compositional technique, including essays on Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy, Brahms, Hindemith and Shostakovich, as well as books such as Modulating Forms (1986) and Motiv i formoobrazovaniye (1987). His legacy is recognised chiefly for introducing Schoenbergian research into his country and for establishing a school of form analysis based on the motif.