Evgeniâ Lineva

Evgeniâ Eduarovna Lineva (also spelled Evgeniia, Evgeniya or Eugenie, 1854–1919) was a Russian singer and folk-song collector known for her recordings of Russian and Ukrainian peasant songs. Trained as an opera singer, she formed a Russian choir to promote Russian music in America in the 1890s. She then travelled in Russia and Ukraine collecting phonograph recordings of folk songs, which she transcribed and published. Acknowledged as the earliest musical ethnographer in Russia, she preserved songs in their contexts which proved influential on later composers, especially Igor Stravinsky.

Early life She was born Evgeniâ Paprits in Brest-Litovsk on 9 January 1854, the daughter of the director of the Kiev Opera, where she sang. She was trained by Mikhail Glinka and at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. She performed as a contralto in Moscow, Budapest, Paris, London and Vienna, where she was promoted by Anton Rubenstein.

In 1889 she married the electrical engineer A. L. Linev, a political liberal who was in danger of arrest in Russia. They left the country and lived in London 1890–2, then moved to New York. She is noted as the first person to record Russian peasant music with a phonograph, one of the earliest musical ethnographers in Russia and one of the first to adopt a scientific approach to music collecting. Diagram of a phonograph, showing the resin cylinder Livena refers to. Livena's cylinders were acquired by the USSR Acadmeny of Sciences. Lineva described the process: ‘What had seemed impossible was now a fact. Songs, echoing somewhere in space—filling the fields, forests, and villages, unconquerable—could now be captured on the cylinder made of delicate resin…' She then approximated these songs in standard musical notation so that they could be published. These appeared in several landmark publications between 1904 and 1912, including the multi-volume Folk Songs of Great Russia. Her Folk Songs of the Ukraine was translated into English in 1958.

Lineva's work described 'the surroundings in which the song lives' including its cultural context and the behaviour of the performer, and also provided an analysis of technical elements such as part-singing, choral texture, voice leading, rhythmical freedom, and polyphonic singing. The influence of her collection on Stravinsky, who owned a copy of The Peasant Songs of Great Russia, has been noted.

From 1903, Lineva became secretary of the Musical-Ethnographical Commission, which organised concerts of peasant singers. In 1906, she was involved in the foundation of a Folk Conservatory in Moscow where she taught courses in folk music.

She died in Moscow on 24 January 1919.