Pencho Stoyanov

Pencho Stoyanov graduated in composition from the State Academy of Music in Sofia in 1955, from the classes of Parashkev Hadzhiev and Pancho Vladigerov, and went on to study composition with Aram Khachaturian and musicology with Protopopov, Zuckerman and Skrebkov at the Moscow Conservatory, attending the courses of Tony Aubin and Olivier Messiaen in Paris as a scholarship holder. He taught harmony and music theory at the academy in Sofia from 1964, adding musical analysis two years later; he became a docent in 1966, a professor in 1972 and a doctor of arts in 1981, and generations of theory and composition students passed through his classes. He led composition masterclasses in Germany, the Republic of Korea and Austria, sat on competition juries in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, and took composition prizes in Poland in 1955 and France in 1978. His catalogue runs to five symphonies, three symphonic poems, three overtures, a piano quintet, two string quartets, three violin sonatas, solo piano works, song cycles and more than three hundred and fifty choral songs, beside books and studies on music theory. He began teaching at the State Academy of Music in 1955 as an assistant in harmony and theory and from 1956 in musical analysis, and he was born in Sofia on 9 February 1931 and died on 24 November 2020. He read papers at symposia and conferences in Germany, marking the seven hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Berlin, at Dijon in France, and in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia, Yugoslavia and Greece, while his composition masterclasses abroad fell in Germany in 1989, in the Republic of Korea between 1992 and 1996 and in Austria in 1995. Former pupils of his teach at universities in the United States, the Republic of Korea, Germany, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Vietnam, and a divertimento for string orchestra stands among his orchestral works.