Vera Andreyevna Vasina-Grossman

Vera Andreyevna Vasina-Grossman (Ryazan, 1908 – Moscow, 1990) was a Russian musicologist whose work focused on small-scale vocal music and on the relationship between poetic text and melody. Working in the Soviet Union of the twentieth century, she combined academic research with a notable commitment to teaching, which sets her apart from many of her colleagues.

She trained at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating from the history and theory department in 1938. She obtained the degree of candidate in 1941 with a dissertation on the Russian ballad of the early nineteenth century, and in 1954 she earned her doctorate with a work on the classical Russian ballad. From 1939 she combined teaching at the Central School of Music with her work at the Central Institute of Music Education by Correspondence. She taught at the Moscow Conservatory between 1943 and 1957 and, from 1949 to 1978, was principal researcher at the Institute of Art History in Moscow.

Her command of poetry and her ear for the musicality of verse were reflected in studies of Glinka's vocal music, the Romantic lied of Austria and Germany, and the ballads of Soviet composers. This work culminated in the three-volume Music and Poetic Word (1972–1978), in which she analysed the components and aspects of the synthesis between text and music. She sat on the editorial board of two major collective works, the History of Russian Soviet Music and the History of the Music of the Peoples of the USSR, and wrote on Russian music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as on film music.

Her interest in teaching took shape in books for beginners, such as Primer on Music (1951), and in volumes aimed at more experienced readers. Her legacy rests above all on her study of the song and the ballad as genres in which music and poetry fuse, and on her effort to bring music within reach of readers at every level.