Vasily Prokunin

Vasily Pavlovich Prokunin (16 [28] January 1848 – 1 [14] May 1910) was a Russian musical folklorist, composer, and teacher. He was the brother of M. P. Prokunin and a cousin of A. F. Lavdovskaya.

He was born in Sosnovka, Morshansky Uyezd, Tambov Governorate, into the family of Pavel Demidovich Prokunin, the owner of a chemical enterprise, and his wife Yulia Pavlovna. One source indicates that he studied music with Theodor Gravert, the husband of his father’s sister.

Prokunin first studied at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and then at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and piano with Nikolai Grigoryevich Rubinstein (1872–1877). After graduating, on Tchaikovsky’s recommendation, he became a pianist and répétiteur at the Odessa Opera Theatre.

He later taught in N. A. Muromtseva’s music school and other educational institutions in Moscow; from 1890 he worked at the Nikolaev Orphan Institute. Among his pupils was Alexander B. Goldenweiser.

From the late 1860s to the early 1870s Prokunin began collecting Russian folk songs, chiefly in the Tambov and Moscow governorates. In 1872–1873 he published the two-part collection “Russian Folk Songs for Solo Voice with Piano Accompaniment” (edited by Tchaikovsky and issued by P. I. Jurgenson), a major contribution to Russian musical ethnography. The collection was highly praised by Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who used several of its songs in his opera “The Snow Maiden”; it was reissued in 1928.

In 1889, together with N. M. Lopatin, Prokunin issued the “Collection of Russian Folk Lyric Songs,” for which he was responsible for the second (musical) part. This publication became an important step in approaching Russian folk polyphony: in contrast to the chordal-harmonic treatment typical of his first collection, Prokunin adopted contrapuntal accompaniment with elements of heterophony.

As a composer he wrote several romances, including settings of poems by Alexey Koltsov (“In the Field the Wind Blows,” “Flight,” “The Sun Shines”), as well as texts by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (“I Go Out Alone onto the Road”), Alexey Merzlyakov (“Among the Level Valleys”), and others; some of these songs were published in 1871. Prokunin died in Moscow on 1 [14] May 1910. He was also interested in entomology, and after his death his butterfly collection was transferred to the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University.

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