Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich Medushevsky

Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich Medushevsky is a Russian musicologist born in Moscow in 1939, whose work lies in the field of musical analysis and the theory of perception in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. His training and teaching career took place almost entirely at the Moscow Conservatory, where he is a significant figure in the discipline.

He studied musicology at that conservatory between 1958 and 1963, under Skrebkov, and completed his postgraduate studies there in 1966, the year he began teaching musical analysis. In 1971 he obtained the Kandidat degree with a dissertation on the relationship between the structure of a work and the way the listener perceives it, and in 1985 he attained the doctorate. His teaching career advanced to associate professor in 1978 and to full professor in 1990.

His writings deal with the communicative function of music, with the construction and perception of expressive resources, and with the temporal organisation of a work. From the 1990s he developed the notion of 'intervallic' or intonational form, inspired by Asafiev, which conceives intonation as an indissoluble unity of articulation, pitch, timbre, rhythm and intensity. According to him, this form arises from the interaction between a proto-intonational dimension, linked to experiences of the right hemisphere, and a structural organisation based on discontinuity and commensurability. From 1993 he broadened his interests towards spirituality in music and the synthesis of different areas of study.

His legacy rests above all on this theoretical proposal, which he regards as key to addressing questions of musical language, of genres and styles, and of the historical evolution of listening. His bibliography, in Russian and English and published in journals and edited volumes, remains a reference for those studying musical semiotics and the psychology of music in the Slavic world.