Nicolas Slonimsky - Dear Dorothy : Letters from Nicolas Slonimsky to Dorothy Adlow

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With this lively and affectionate collection of letters, Electra Slonimsky Yourke issues the seventh volume of writings by her father, Nicolas Slonimsky (18941995), the famed Russian-American composer , conductor, critic, and lexicographer. Uprooted by the Russian Revolution, Slonimsky forged a distinctive career in music, first in Paris, then in the United States. Culturally adaptive, with an exceptional range of intellectual and artistic gifts, he seemed to gain satisfaction by donning diverse hats. When I was a child, Slonimsky writes in a letter from September 26, 1941, I dreamed exactly of the sort of thing I am doing now, very international, very spectacular, humorous , multilingual, slightly sensational. Airplanes, exotic lands, stunts, some actual accomplishment, recognition slightly off base, multifarious application. It was a remarkably perceptive self-assessment.

Slonimsky conducted American music in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North and South America, disseminating the latest (often far-out) works by his modernist colleagues, and he had an equally important career as a music critic and lexicographer. He edited the widely consulted Bakers Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (beginning with the fifth edition in 1958), and he assembled compendia of eccentric yet essential facts and materials, such as his Music Since 1900 (1937), an annotated chronology of musical events and developments; Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), which gained a cult following among such jazz and rock musicians as John Coltrane and Frank Zappa; and Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethovens Time (1952), which mined the indictments of music critics with an eye for humor and wit. Over time, it became apparent that Slonimsky was not only a brilliant musician, but he was also really funny. In his later years, he even appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, performing tone clusters like vaudeville acts.

The previous books edited by Electra Slonimsky Yourke have focused on her fathers published writings. Here she turns to his correspondence with her mother, Dorothy Adlow (190164), a highly respected art critic. Adlows parents had Old World Jewish roots from the border area between Latvia and Poland, and they established a business in Roxbury, then a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Boston. Adlow attended Girls Latin School and Radcliffe College. She had a distinguished career writing art criticism for the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications, and giving lectures around the country. She saved the letters from her husband, while hers to him are largely lost. So the voice of Slonimsky dominates this conversation.

American music often gets studied within U.S. borders. Here a valuable transnational perspective emerges, conveyed from an important promoter of American composers. At the same time, this book offers tantalizing glimpses of a professional woman whose legacy as an art critic deserves further study.

To top it off, the letters from Slonimsky to Adlow yield a compulsively good read.

Carol J. Oja

Harvard University