Oleg Timofeyev is a musicologist, guitarist, composer, documentary film director, and the world authority on the Russian seven-string guitar tradition. Timofeyev holds an M.A. in Early Music Performance from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from Duke University. The recipient of two IREX Fellowships, two Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowships, he has won the coveted Noah Greenberg Award for his CDs “Music of Russian Princesses at the Court of Catherine the Great.” In addition, he has recorded more than twenty CD solo and ensemble recordings featuring the music for the Russian seven-string guitar, to critical acclaim worldwide. Dr. Timofeyev has taught at universities and conservatoires in the US, Russia, and Ukraine. In addition to a book on Russian-Romani guitar playing (Centerstream, 2018) and a critical edition of collected works by Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev (with Stefan Wester, DGA Editions, 2020), Timofeyev’s monograph on the seven–string guitar in Russia is coming out next year (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).

About the Guitar

Together with his older contemporaries Fedor Paserbsky and Robert Arkhuzen, Mikhail Eroshkin (1870–1922) belonged to the turn-of-the-century school of guitar builders in Russia. Unlike their predecessors of the so–called “Krasnoschekov School,” the builders around 1900 mainly constructed robust, loud instruments usually equipped with double neck and additional basses. Thus, in addition to the seven strings on the main neck (D G B d g b d’), this 1912 guitar by Eroshkin has five basses on the additional neck, usually tuned (from bottom to top) B C E F A. Another feature of this guitar is the double back, which is supposed to make the sound of the instrument stronger.