Grigory Kogan

Grigory Mikhailovich Kogan (1901–1979) was a Soviet pianist, musicologist, and music educator. He became a professor and, in 1940, one of the first to receive the Doctor of Arts degree in the USSR on the basis of his established achievements, without defending a dissertation. His father was an engineer, and his parents belonged to the Social Democratic circle associated with Georgi Plekhanov (the Mensheviks), a background that strongly influenced Kogan’s worldview; he remained a convinced Marxist throughout his life, in a specifically Plekhanov-oriented interpretation.

After the defeat of the 1905–1907 revolution, Kogan’s family emigrated to Belgium, where his musical education began. In 1911 the family returned to Kyiv, and in 1914 he entered the conservatory there. He studied piano with A. N. Shtoss-Petrova and V. V. Pukhaltsky, and also took composition lessons with Reinhold Gliere. After graduating in 1920, he began teaching at the conservatory and appearing as a concert pianist.

From 1926 to 1943 Kogan worked at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught a course he developed on the history and theory of pianism; from 1936 he headed the department devoted to this discipline. In 1932 he chaired the commission preparing the First All-Union Competition of Performing Musicians, but later left the commission due to disagreements with the Arts Sector of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Education and published a restrainedly critical article on the competition’s results in the journal “Soviet Music” (1933, no. 4). During World War II he was evacuated with the main staff of the Moscow Conservatory to Saratov in 1941, and in 1943 resigned in protest against staffing decisions that, in his view, unfairly left many established faculty in Saratov while a new staff was recruited in Moscow; his position was taken by his former student A. A. Nikolaev.

Among Kogan’s students from his regular Moscow Conservatory period were prominent musicians, including Alexander Alexeyev and Sviatoslav Richter. In 1948 he took an active role in organizing the Union of Soviet Composers and headed its Commission on Musical Education, which developed recommendations to expand a broad network of music schools across the country. At the invitation of Nazib Zhiganov, in the late 1940s and early 1950s he joined the faculty of the Kazan Conservatory, where his students included Sofia Gubaidulina and I. E. Guselnikov.

As a pianist, Kogan performed in concerts throughout the USSR and in Bulgaria; the authorities did not allow him to travel to capitalist countries. He was known for a wide repertoire and for advocating music by lesser-known composers as well as contemporary Soviet works. As a musicologist, his research addressed the psychology of performance and the pianist’s work, and the relationship between technique and style; he also wrote studies on pianists and harpsichordists, critical articles, and a number of books. He was an active promoter of Sergei Rachmaninoff, leaving an unpublished book on the composer in manuscript.

Several substantial materials remained unpublished, including his memoir book “The Novel of My Life,” a book of aphorisms “Life in Thoughts,” and about 60 hours of tape recordings (solo piano playing, lecture courses and talks, interviews, and demonstration lessons). In 1970, in a major article circulated in samizdat (anonymously or under pseudonyms) titled “On the Theory of Leninism and the Practice of Building Socialism in the Soviet Union,” he offered a consistent Marxist analysis of conditions in the USSR and predicted an inevitable, imminent collapse of Soviet power and a restoration of capitalism. His ashes were placed in the columbarium of the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow.

Among his published works are “The School of Piano Transcription” (1937; 1970), “Soviet Pianistic Art and Russian Artistic Traditions” (1948), “At the Gates of Mastery” (1958; 1961; 2004), “On Piano Texture” (1961), “The Pianist’s Work” (1963; 1969; 2004), “Ferruccio Busoni” (1964; 1971), and several volumes of selected articles issued between 1968 and 1985. In the 2000s, based on archival memoir, photo, and audio materials, screenwriter Mikhail Dzyubenko (Kogan’s grandson and heir) prepared a feature-length documentary concept about Kogan; director Irina Bessarabova filmed two short films in 2004–2005 (“Grigory Kogan. Transcription” and “The Little Door of the Conservatory”), with a third part left unfinished due to lack of funding.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the art history graph.