Nikolay Ladukhin

Nikolay Ladukhin was born in St Petersburg in 1860. His older brother Alexei also became a musician, a pianist. Nikolay studied at the Moscow Conservatory, the city’s music school, and he finished in 1886, at 25. His composition teacher was Sergei Taneyev, a former pupil of Tchaikovsky, who was only four years older than him. Later Ladukhin dedicated one of his first published pieces to Taneyev.

In the autumn of 1886, the same year he finished, the conservatory asked him to stay and teach. He taught solfège, singing music at sight, and harmony there for more than thirty years, until 1917. He became a professor in 1904.

He also wrote music: pieces for orchestra, about twelve songs that famous singers of the day sang, music for choir, and a hundred songs for children. His easy piano pieces were printed in Moscow and Leipzig, and later in London and New York. But most of all he wrote books for students. The exercises in this app come from his Collection of Monophonic Solfeggi. He wrote each exercise as a small, complete piece of music, not as a dry drill. Some of them move between keys in rich, complex ways, in the style of his time, the late Romantic period.

People who knew him remembered him as a very good teacher who loved his students. He died in Moscow in 1918, at 57.

Ladukhin spent his whole working life teaching students to read and sing music. His exercises are used so widely in Russia that they often appear in other textbooks without his name.