Irina Yevgenyevna Lozovaya (; 5 February 1950 – 9 July 2017) Soviet and Russian musicologist, teacher, Professor at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Her main sphere of academic research was Early Russian and Byzantine chant.
Biography
Born in Moscow to the family of the military engineer Evgeny Fyodorovitch Lozovoy. Music study started while a child. In 1971 she finished the course in music theory at the Moscow Music College linked with the Moscow Conservatory, gaining a diploma with distinction. The same year she entered the Conservatory in the department of theory and composition. Since 1973, influenced by her husband Mikhail Kollontay, she started research on the early Russian chant tradition. In 1976 she graduated from the conservatory and started postgraduate studies under the tutorship of Valentina Kholopova, completing them in 1981. She submitted her PhD thesis Original Traits of the Stolpovoy Znamenny Chant (defended in Kyiv, 1987).
She worked as a scholarly editor for the publishing houses Sovetskaya Encyclopedia (1976-1989) and Kompozitor (1990–1993), and was also a lecturer at the St.-Tikhon Theological Orthodox Institute (now Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University) (1992–1997).
From 1993 onwards she worked at the Department of the History of Russian Music of the Moscow Conservatory (from 2000 as a professor).
In 1995 she became the head of the Rev. Dimitry Razumovsky Scholarly Centre for Russian Church Music within the Department of the History of Russian Music, which in September 2017 was transformed into the Scholarly Creative Centre of Church Music. During this period she organised at the conservatory five international scholarly conferences and was editor-in-chief of their proceedings titled “Hymnology” (7 issues, 2000–2017). She organised the section “Byzantium and Old Rus’: Liturgical and Chant Traditions” at the international scholarly theological conference “Russia and Athos: A Millennium of Spiritual Unity” (2006).
She created and ran (from 1994) a special course of lectures on “The History of Russian Music of the 11th to 17th Centuries”. She also initiated additional faculty courses that developed and deepened the main sphere of her scholarly activity. Among them were: “The practical study of znamenny chant based on the living tradition”, “Musical palaeography”, “Greek palaeography”, “Slavic palaeography,” “An introduction to Byzantine and early Russian art” and “Znamenny chant”. To enhance the liturgical and general cultural horizon of the students she initiated a course on the “History of Eastern Orthodox worship”, which still continues.
From 1998 she collaborated with the Orthodox Encyclopedia ecclesiastical scholarly centre as a member of the editorial board and curator of the “Worship and Church music” department (since 2004 an independent department of “Church music”); she was the author of a number of entries on early Russian and Byzantine church music. Under her tutorship two PhD theses were submitted, one by Olga Tiurina (“Early Russian Melismatic Chant: the Great Chant”, 2011) and the other by Irina Starikova (“The Psalmody of the Vigils in Early Russian Chant Art”, 2013).
In 2004/2005 Irina Lozovaya was the co-founder with Anna Yeliseyeva of the Asmatikon ensemble, which specialises on performing early Russian and Byzantine liturgical chants.
She was a member of the editorial board of the Moscow conservatory and influenced the publishing policy of the conservatory with regard to early Russian chant.
Research Activity
She was the author of numerous articles and entries on the problems of the history and theory of Eastern Christian liturgical chant art in various anthologies of articles and encyclopedias including Musical Encyclopedia (, 1973–1982), Musical Encyclopedic Dictionary (, 1990), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edition, Vol. 29, 2004), Orthodox Encyclopedia (2000-2017).
Characteristic of Lozovaya's work is her comprehensive approach to studying the liturgical chant books. The main task of their investigation, in her opinion, requires a combination of the methods of both historical and theoretical musicology and therefore presupposes a good knowledge of historical liturgiology, palaeography and codicology.
Important for Lozovaya's scholarly method was a consideration of early Russian music within the historical “Byzantine” perspective: