Yevgeniya Linyova

Yevgeniya Eduardovna Linyova, also known abroad as Eugenie Lineff, was a Russian musical ethnographer whose fieldwork and transcription shaped the study of polyphonic folk song in her country. Born in Brest-Litovsk, today Brest (Belarus), in 1853 or probably 1854, according to the dates that are known, she died in Moscow in 1919. Before devoting herself to research, she trained as a professional singer and performed in opera productions in Vienna, Budapest, London, Paris and Moscow, where she sang at the Bolshoi in 1882–1883.

Alongside her stage career, she worked clandestinely for an illegal revolutionary publishing house, translating works by Marx and Engels between 1882 and 1884. Towards the end of the 1880s she gave up both professional singing and revolutionary activity, and made her first recordings of folk songs, which no longer survive. After her marriage, she lived as an émigré in the United Kingdom (1891–1892) and the United States (1892–1896). In New York, Philadelphia and at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 she presented her Russian repertoire with a choir, to great acclaim, and the proceeds helped sustain an émigré press.

On her return to Russia she used the phonograph, which she had encountered in the United States, to record folk songs. Between 1897 and 1901 she undertook expeditions to the provinces of Voronezh, Tambov, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir, Kostroma, Novgorod and Vologda, and between 1903 and 1913 she worked in Ukraine, Slovakia and Serbia, in addition to studying the Doukhobors and Molokans of the Caucasus. She collaborated with the Moscow Commission for Musical Ethnography and in 1906, on her own initiative, founded the Popular Conservatory, where she offered free choral singing training to people of limited means. She took part in the international musicological congresses in Vienna (1909) and London (1911), and received a gold medal for her publications in 1905.

Although she was not the first to record folklore in Russia, her name is associated with the arrival of phonographic recording in Russian ethnomusicology, and her choral transcriptions are regarded as among the most faithful to the originals. She formulated as the basic principle of Russian folk polyphony the simultaneous performance of several variants of a melody, with the voices always converging on a final unison. Her ideas, akin to those of Yu. N. Mel'gunov, influenced Adler's conception of heterophony. Although several types of folk polyphony have since been distinguished, her work retains its validity and continues to exert considerable influence on Russian musicology. Much of her recordings is preserved at the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg, and the remainder of her manuscripts at the Central State Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow.