Doctor of Arts, Professor of Music History at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, Member of the Union of Russian Composers
Vera B. Valkova graduated in musicology from the Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) State Glinka Conservatory in 1971 with her thesis, «Musical Dramaturgy in W. Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 2.» In 1977, she completed studies at the Gnesin State Musical Institute in Moscow and, four years later, defended her post-graduate dissertation, New Perspectives on Thematicism in Soviet Symphonic Music of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1993, Dr. Valkova defended her doctoral dissertation, Musical Thematicism — Thought — Culture. Since 2000, she has lived and worked in Moscow, combining her pedagogical work as Professor of Music History at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music with her work as Senior Academic Fellow at the State Institute for Art Studies (from 2008).
Dr. Valkova’s students A. Bibikova and E. Kluchnikova are prizewinning academic authors.
Dr. Valkova is the organizer of a series of academic conferences that have taken place at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music and which have since become an international biannual cycle: «Musical Sociology: New Strategies in the Humanities» and «Musicological Forum,» first held in 2007 and 2010, respectively. She has also participated in numerous international conferences: in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Volgograd, Krasnoyarsk, Tampere (Finland), Vilnius (Lithuania), Berlin, Leuven (Belgium), and London.
Dr. Valkova is the author of the monographs Musical Thematicism — Thought — Culture (Nizhny Novgorod, 1992), S. V. Rachmaninoff and Russian Musical Culture of His Time (Tambov, 2016), and A Chronicle of the Life and Work of S. V. Rachmaninoff: Part I: 1873–1899 (Tambov, 2017). There are more than one hundred publications by her, including «Intertextual Dialogs in Rachmaninoff’s The Bells,» in Sociocultural Crossings and Borders: Musical Microhistories, edited by Rūta Stanevičiūtė and Rima Povilionienė (Vilnius: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, 2015), 470–80; and «The Category of the ‘Spread-Out Theme’ in Contemporary Russian Music Theory,» in Topical Areas of Fundamental and Applied Research XII (North Charleston, SC: spc Academic, 2017), 14–23.
