Dimitri Arakishvili

Dimitri Arakishvili was a Georgian composer and ethnomusicologist regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Georgian music. He helped in founding the People’s Conservatory in Moscow, and was actively involved in collecting and popularising Georgian folk-music. An academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and Laureate of the USSR State Prize (1950), Arakishvili is one of the founders of the Georgian School of composition. In the period 1894–1901 he attended the school of music and drama (attached to the Moscow Philharmonic Society) where he studied composition with A. Il′insky, and theory with S. Kruglikov (1894–1901), later improving his compositional technique with Grechaninov (1910–11). In 1917 he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Archaeology. In 1897 he had started writing for the Russian and the Georgian press on musical matters, in 1901 became a member of the musico-ethnological commission at Moscow University, and in 1907 a member of the Georgian Society for Literature and Art in Moscow. He was an associate of the foremost Russian composers of the day – such as Taneyev, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Arensky and Pyatnitsky – and was one of the organizers of the People’s Conservatory in Moscow. From 1908 to 1912, was editor-in-chief of the journal Muzika i zhizn. One of his major interests was Georgian folk music and he traveled throughout Georgia collecting traditional music and over 500 folk songs from 1901 to 1908. When Georgia established an independent republic in 1918, Arakishvili moved to Tbilisi and founded a conservatory which was merged with the Tbilisi State Conservatory in 1923. He taught and composed, and directed the Conservatory from 1926 to 1929. He was actively involved in collecting and popularizing Georgian folk songs and published books on Georgian folk music.