Gippius, Evgenii

Born June 24 (July 7), 1903, in Tsarskoe Selo, now the city of Pushkin, Leningrad Oblast. Soviet music critic and musical ethnographer. Doctor of art criticism (1958).

Gippius studied in the department of social sciences of the University of Petrograd. He graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Art History in 1924 and from the scientific composition department of the Leningrad Conservatory in 1928. He studied composition with M. O. Shteinberg, conducting with N. A. Mal’ko, and music history with B. V. Asaf’ev. Gippius specialized in gathering and studying folk music and poetry. He took part in expeditions to the Russian North (Pinega, Mezen’, Pechora), Central Russia, Byelorussian Poles’e, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. Gippius studied the folklore of the peoples of Siberia, the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples, and gypsies. He also studied the songs of the Russian workers’ and the international revolutionary movements. In 1927 he founded and until 1943 was the scientific director of the phonogram archive of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Gippius was chairman of the department of folk music at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1939 to 1941. He was a professor and chairman of the department of musical folklore at the Moscow Conservatory from 1944 to 1949. He was a senior scholar at the Institute of Ethnography from 1931 to 1952 and at the Moscow Institute of Art History from 1959 to 1963.