Simon Morrison
Encyclopedia
Simon Morrison is a music historian specializing in 20th-century music, particularly Russian and Soviet music, with special interests in dance, cinema, and historically informed performance based on extensive archival research. He is a leading authority on composer Sergey Prokofiev and has received unprecedented access to the composer's papers, housed in Moscow at RGALI. Morrison received his B.Mus. from the University of Toronto (1987), a Master's in Musicology from McGill University (1993), and Ph.D. from Princeton University
(1997), where he is Professor of Music.http://www.music.princeton.edu/ His distinctions include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1999),http://wwww.ams-net.org/awards/einsteinwinners.php an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2001), a Phi Beta Kappa Society Teacher Award (2006), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011).
Morrison is author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford University Press, 2009)http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Music/MusicHistoryWestern/TwentiethCentury/?view=usa&ci=9780195181678 as well as Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (University of California Press, 2002). As Scholar-in-Residence for the 2008 Bard Music Festival, he edited the essay collection Sergey Prokofiev and His World (Princeton University Press, 2008). Among his other publications are essays on Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Shostakovich's ballet The Bolt, numerous reviews and shorter articles, including pieces for the New York Times.
Morrison is actively engaged in the performing arts, most notably ballet, and has translated his archival findings into new productions. In 2005 he oversaw the recreation of the Prokofiev ballet Le Pas d'Acier at Princeton Universityhttp://www.pasdacier.co.uk and in 2007 co-produced a world premiere staging of Alexander Pushkin's drama Boris Godunovhttp://silvertone.princeton.edu/boris/ featuring Prokofiev's incidental music and Vsevolod Meyerhold's directorial concepts. In 2008, Morrision restored the scenario and score of the original (1935) version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet for the Mark Morris
Dance Group.http://www.markmorrisdancegroup.org The projecthttp://lovelives.net involved orchestrating act IV (featuring a happy ending) from Prokofiev’s annotations and rearranging the order and adjusting the content of acts I-III. This version of the ballet was premiered on July 4, 2008 and began an international tour in September. He has also recently brought to light Prokofiev's score Music for athletes/Fizkul’turnaya muzyka (1939), which Morrison describes as "cheerful, sardonic music composed for a scary political cause: a Stalinist (totalitarian) display of the physical prowess of Soviet youth."http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S24/72/60C86/index.xml?section=featured And in the spring of 2010, he staged Claude Debussy's final masterpiece, the ballet The Toy-Box (La boîte à joujoux), using a version of the score premiered in 1918 by the Moscow Chamber Theater that features a previously unknown "jazz overture." Also on the bill was the original version of John Alden Carpenter's jazz ballet, Krazy Kat (1921), based on the iconic comic strip.http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/04/70C54/index.xml?section=featured
At present Morrison is researching and writing L, a work of biographical non-fiction under contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.http://www.lmqlit.com/author-display.php?art=Simon+Morrison
[Editor]. Sergey Prokofiev and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
[With Nelly Kravetz]. "The Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, or How the Specter of Communism Haunted Prokofiev." Journal of Musicology 23, no. 2 (2006): 227-62.
"Russia’s Lament." In Word, Music, History: A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson, 657-81. Ed. Lazar Fleishman, Gabriella Safran, Michael Wachtel. Stanford Slavic Studies 29-30 (2005).
"Shostakovich as Industrial Saboteur: Observations on The Bolt." In Shostakovich and His World, 117-61. Ed. Laurel Fay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2002.
"Skryabin and the Impossible." Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998): 283-330; reprint, Journal of the Scriabin Society of America 7, no. 1 (2002-03): 29-66.
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
(1997), where he is Professor of Music.http://www.music.princeton.edu/ His distinctions include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1999),http://wwww.ams-net.org/awards/einsteinwinners.php an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2001), a Phi Beta Kappa Society Teacher Award (2006), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011).
Morrison is author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford University Press, 2009)http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Music/MusicHistoryWestern/TwentiethCentury/?view=usa&ci=9780195181678 as well as Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (University of California Press, 2002). As Scholar-in-Residence for the 2008 Bard Music Festival, he edited the essay collection Sergey Prokofiev and His World (Princeton University Press, 2008). Among his other publications are essays on Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Shostakovich's ballet The Bolt, numerous reviews and shorter articles, including pieces for the New York Times.
Morrison is actively engaged in the performing arts, most notably ballet, and has translated his archival findings into new productions. In 2005 he oversaw the recreation of the Prokofiev ballet Le Pas d'Acier at Princeton Universityhttp://www.pasdacier.co.uk and in 2007 co-produced a world premiere staging of Alexander Pushkin's drama Boris Godunovhttp://silvertone.princeton.edu/boris/ featuring Prokofiev's incidental music and Vsevolod Meyerhold's directorial concepts. In 2008, Morrision restored the scenario and score of the original (1935) version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet for the Mark Morris
Mark Morris
Mark William Morris is an American dancer, choreographer and director whose work is acclaimed for its craftsmanship, ingenuity, humor, and at times eclectic musical accompaniments...
Dance Group.http://www.markmorrisdancegroup.org The projecthttp://lovelives.net involved orchestrating act IV (featuring a happy ending) from Prokofiev’s annotations and rearranging the order and adjusting the content of acts I-III. This version of the ballet was premiered on July 4, 2008 and began an international tour in September. He has also recently brought to light Prokofiev's score Music for athletes/Fizkul’turnaya muzyka (1939), which Morrison describes as "cheerful, sardonic music composed for a scary political cause: a Stalinist (totalitarian) display of the physical prowess of Soviet youth."http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S24/72/60C86/index.xml?section=featured And in the spring of 2010, he staged Claude Debussy's final masterpiece, the ballet The Toy-Box (La boîte à joujoux), using a version of the score premiered in 1918 by the Moscow Chamber Theater that features a previously unknown "jazz overture." Also on the bill was the original version of John Alden Carpenter's jazz ballet, Krazy Kat (1921), based on the iconic comic strip.http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/04/70C54/index.xml?section=featured
At present Morrison is researching and writing L, a work of biographical non-fiction under contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.http://www.lmqlit.com/author-display.php?art=Simon+Morrison
Selected publications
The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.[Editor]. Sergey Prokofiev and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
[With Nelly Kravetz]. "The Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, or How the Specter of Communism Haunted Prokofiev." Journal of Musicology 23, no. 2 (2006): 227-62.
"Russia’s Lament." In Word, Music, History: A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson, 657-81. Ed. Lazar Fleishman, Gabriella Safran, Michael Wachtel. Stanford Slavic Studies 29-30 (2005).
"Shostakovich as Industrial Saboteur: Observations on The Bolt." In Shostakovich and His World, 117-61. Ed. Laurel Fay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2002.
"Skryabin and the Impossible." Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998): 283-330; reprint, Journal of the Scriabin Society of America 7, no. 1 (2002-03): 29-66.