Anna Vilenskaya. European Tour 2025 from 17 October 2025 to 1 November 2025

Anna Vilenskaya is a musicologist, lecturer and researcher of contemporary music. She has changed the approach of storytelling about music towards visualization, simplicity, emotionality and practical benefits for the listener.

The topic of the lecture: Avant-garde: what was it?
In the early 20th century, composers decided to radically change their approach to music - and then almost all of them abandoned it. Why? Did avant-garde strategies exhaust themselves? Let's try to bring together the variety of directions and find out whether it's possible to compose avant-garde music today. Let's talk about extreme experiments, the decline and burnout of the avant-garde as a movement, and recall key figures and styles. And at the same time we will think about why today "avant-garde" sounds more like a historical term than a living practice.

Lecture topic: How Music Became Classical
Why did " classical" stop being just music and become high culture? Where did the very phrase "classical music" even come from? Why were special halls built for symphonies, and why did names like "Beethoven" sound almost like the surnames of apostles? Maybe if we rethink our sense of awe, the glass partition between the untrained listener and "high" culturewill disappear , and humanity will benefit. Or maybe there are reasons to leave things as they are?

Lecture topic: AI and music: evolution from 2014 to 2025
AI has already replaced composers - but how exactly did this happen? Let's trace the path from the first generative models to today's artificial composers. See what mistakes AI made in music and how programmers corrected them. We will understand how machines learn to write music, what algorithms are behind it and why different models "think" differently. And in the finale we will try to guess who wrote the fragment - a human or AI.

Lecture topic: Jazz: chords, rhythms, form - recipe and history
Jazz is a virtuosic music closely related to the body and African traditions. It is a romanticized field shrouded in a veil of mystery and complexity. No wonder so many people say, "I don't know anything about it." Especially for such people - let's go through the whole thing: what a musician does on stage, what are the differences between jazz styles, and why jazz is much closer than it seems.
 

Lecture topic: Background Music
"Backgroundmusic" is a very new concept. Only the 20th century could afford it, and at first composers had very different ideas on how to compose it. Let's talk about how our brain perceives background music, how Brian Eno prilumal soothes passengers in aerophobia with ambient, who wrote music for elevators, and how melodies played on hold on telephone lines are composed. After all, it's background music that holds the imprint of an era, like Frutiger or retrowave music. Let's take background music seriously and find the beauty in it.

Lecture topic: Women in Music: from Hildegarde to Taylor Swift 
Let's try to see if Chernigovskaya and others are really right when they say we have no new female "Mozarts." Let's trace the history of women composers from the Middle Ages (Hildegard of Bingen) to the present (Galina Ustvolskaya, Taylor Swift). Let's talk about what it meant to be a woman in the musical world of different eras. Let's compare women's music with the compositions of male contemporaries and honestly ask: was it good music? And at the same time look for what their biographies have in common.

Lecture topic:ATime to Love Stravinsky
There is a popular opinion among musicians. It goes like this: the twentieth century did not begin in 1900, it began in 1913, when people heard Stravinsky's ballet "Sacred Spring". Stravinsky was a Russian émigré, a trendsetter of musical fashion and an epathetic intellectual. But the main thing is that his music can be listened to in everyday life and you can draw energy from it if you understand how it is made. In this lecture we will dissect the rhythm, chords, and graphics of Stravinsky's scores to see how his music is made and make it part of our lives.

Lecture topic: The physics of music, or why there are seven notes
Why are there exactly seven notes - and is it just the Europeans? Is there something objectively pleasant or unpleasant about music for all people? Let's dive into the history of temperament - learn how people have been arguing for centuries about how to properly tune a harpsichord, why the clarinet and French horn do not have the same A as other instruments, and why pianos are tuned differently. And what does wood have to do with it? Let's talk about music as physics, tuning as drama, and sound as a cultural mystery.