Ethnomusicologist, teacher, editor.
In 1984 she graduated from the Theory Department of the Tambov Rachmaninov College of Music. In 1989 she completed her studies at the Faculty of History, Theory, and Composition of the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute (supervisor: Professor Marina A. Engovatova), and later completed postgraduate studies at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. In 2000 she defended her PhD thesis «The Melogeography of the Smolensk Region and the Problem of Reconstructing the Ethnocultural Landscape».
Her main research interests concern the geography of folk musical culture. Larisa M. Belogurova is one of Russia’s leading researchers in the field of mapping and areal studies of musical folklore. She specialises in the musical culture of West‑Russian and Belarusian folk traditions. Her fieldwork dates back to 1985 and includes expeditions to the Smolensk, Bryansk, Pskov, Oryol, Voronezh, Belgorod, Moscow, Tambov, Tver, and Ryazan regions, Stavropol Territory, and the Vitebsk and Mogilev regions of Belarus.
She has participated in many international scholarly conferences in Russia and abroad, and has led and taken part in research projects supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Humanities Research Foundation. She is the author of more than sixty scholarly publications. Among her major works is the multivolume scholarly edition Smolensky muzykalno‑etnografichesky sbornik, where she is a member of the permanent authorial team and responsible editor of volume IV Svadba Dneprovskogo levoberezhya: ritual i muzyka and volume VI Traditsionnoe iskusstvo smolenskikh skripachey. In 2012 she initiated and became editor‑in‑chief of the journal Voprosy etnomuzykologii, Russia’s only specialist periodical devoted to ethnomusicological research.
In 2021 she received a Certificate of Honour from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
Selected recent publications:
- «Northern Russian Lament» by Borislava B. Efimenkova: The Beginning of Ethnomusicological Research at the Gnesin Institute, in Scholarly Schools in Musicology of the Twenty‑First Century: On the 125th Anniversary of the Gnesin Educational Institutions, proceedings of the international online conference, 24–27 November 2020, ed. Tatiana I. Naumenko, Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, Moscow, 2020, pp. 594–602;
- «Calendar Song Traditions of the East Slavs: On the Problem of Typology», Voprosy etnomuzykologii, 2020, no. 1 (16), pp. 6–33;
- «The Song‑Ritual Culture of the Orsha Region within the System of Belarusian Regional Traditions», in Musical Culture of Belarus and the World: Current Issues in Ethnomusicology, Music History, and Pedagogy, Scientific Works of the Belarusian State Academy of Music, issue 52, Minsk: BGAM, 2021, pp. 22–31;
- «The North‑West Type of Isometric Wedding Tunes (A Melogeographical Sketch)», Voprosy etnomuzykologii, 2021, no. 1 (17), pp. 6–31;
- Smolensky muzykalno‑etnografichesky sbornik, vol. 6: Traditsionnoe iskusstvo smolenskikh skripachey: Ekspeditsionnye materialy i issledovanie Tatiany N. Kazanskoy, eds. Larisa M. Belogurova and Irina A. Nikitina, Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, Moscow, 2022, 346 pp. (author of the introductory article and scholarly commentary to Kazanskaya’s study);
- «The Main Song Type of the South‑Skopin Wedding: On the Problem of Structural Specificity», Opera musicologica, 2022, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 58–73 (co‑authored with Yulia S. Zhuravleva);
- «Borislava Efimenkova’s Research of Northern Russian Lamentations as the Beginning of the Ethnomusicological Science of the Gnesin Institute», Problemy muzykalnoi nauki / Music Scholarship, 2023, no. 3, pp. 102–111;
- «Gnesin Ethnomusicology in Portraits: Tatiana Nikolaevna Kazanskaya», Uchenye zapiski Rossiyskoy akademii muzyki imeni Gnesinykh, 2022, no. 3 (42), pp. 37–50;
- «The Research Agenda of Marina A. Engovatova in the Context of the Formation and Development of the Structural‑Typological Trend in Russian Ethnomusicology», Voprosy etnomuzykologii, 2023, no. 19, pp. 6–19.
She began her teaching career at the Tambov College of Music (1989–1992) as a teacher of music‑theoretical disciplines. In 1995 she joined the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music as a lecturer in the Department of Music History and a research fellow in the Problem Research Laboratory.
Since 2012 she has taught in the Department of Applied Musical Arts, and since 2018 she has headed the Department of Ethnomusicology. She teaches the courses Theory of Musical Folklore, Folk Musical Creativity, and Ethnography of the East Slavs, among others, gives individual lessons in specialist subjects to ethnomusicology students, and supervises the folklore‑ethnographic (fieldwork) practice of students of the Faculty of History, Theory, and Composition as well as the research practice of bachelor’s and master’s students in ethnomusicology.
