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Simon Morrison
Simon Morrison is a scholar and writer specializing in 20th-century music, particularly Russian, Soviet, and French music, with special interests in dance, cinema, aesthetics, and historically informed performance based on primary sources.
He has conducted archival research in St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, Washington D.C., Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and extensively in Moscow. He has traveled to Tel Aviv, Beijing, Hong Kong, Montreal, Moscow, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Tokyo, and elsewhere to give invited lectures and graduate seminars. He divides his time between Princeton and Los Angeles.
Morrison is the author of Tchaikovsky's Empire (Yale University Press, 2024), named by the Financial Times as one of the "Best Books of the Year," Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks (California, 2022), Roxy Music's Avalon (Bloomsbury, 2021), Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (California, 2002, 2019), Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Tsars to Today (W.W. Norton, 2016), The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (Houghton, 2013), and The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford, 2009) as well as editor of Prokofiev and His World (Princeton, 2008) and, with Klara Moricz, Funeral Games: In Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié (Oxford, 2014).
His history of Moscow, A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow, is to be published by Knopf in spring 2026. He is currently at work on a study of Shostakovich to be published by Norton.
Morrison also maintains a profile as a public intellectual by continuing to write books and feature articles, assisting in ballet and theatre productions, and giving interviews and lectures in his areas of expertise, especially for the 92nd Street Y in New York.
Morrison received his B.Mus. from the University of Toronto (1987), Master's in Musicology from McGill University (1993), and Ph.D. from Princeton University (1997), where he is Professor of Music. His distinctions include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1999), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2001), a Phi Beta Kappa Society Teacher Award (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2022). He is a leading authority on composer Sergey Prokofiev and received unprecedented access to the composer's papers, housed in Moscow at RGALI.
Morrison is most noted as a scholar of Russian and Soviet music, particularly Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, and an expert on ballet. His archival study of the Bolshoi Ballet, Bolshoi Confidential, was published by Liveright (W.W. Norton) in 2016, with additional translations and editions from Random House (Canada), Fourth Estate (UK), and Belfond (France). It was widely reviewed in major news outlets and shortlisted for the Book Prize of Pushkin House, London.
His biography of Lina Prokofiev Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev was featured on BBC Radio 4 (as "Book of the Week"), BBC World News (TV), and WYNC. Favorable reviews appeared in The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and The American Spectator.
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Simon Morrison
Simon Morrison is a scholar and writer specializing in 20th-century music, particularly Russian, Soviet, and French music, with special interests in dance, cinema, aesthetics, and historically informed performance based on primary sources.
He has conducted archival research in St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, Washington D.C., Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and extensively in Moscow. He has traveled to Tel Aviv, Beijing, Hong Kong, Montreal, Moscow, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Tokyo, and elsewhere to give invited lectures and graduate seminars. He divides his time between Princeton and Los Angeles.
Morrison is the author of Tchaikovsky's Empire (Yale University Press, 2024), named by the Financial Times as one of the "Best Books of the Year," Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks (California, 2022), Roxy Music's Avalon (Bloomsbury, 2021), Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (California, 2002, 2019), Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Tsars to Today (W.W. Norton, 2016), The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (Houghton, 2013), and The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford, 2009) as well as editor of Prokofiev and His World (Princeton, 2008) and, with Klara Moricz, Funeral Games: In Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié (Oxford, 2014).
His history of Moscow, A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow, is to be published by Knopf in spring 2026. He is currently at work on a study of Shostakovich to be published by Norton.
Morrison also maintains a profile as a public intellectual by continuing to write books and feature articles, assisting in ballet and theatre productions, and giving interviews and lectures in his areas of expertise, especially for the 92nd Street Y in New York.
Morrison received his B.Mus. from the University of Toronto (1987), Master's in Musicology from McGill University (1993), and Ph.D. from Princeton University (1997), where he is Professor of Music. His distinctions include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1999), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2001), a Phi Beta Kappa Society Teacher Award (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2022). He is a leading authority on composer Sergey Prokofiev and received unprecedented access to the composer's papers, housed in Moscow at RGALI.
Morrison is most noted as a scholar of Russian and Soviet music, particularly Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, and an expert on ballet. His archival study of the Bolshoi Ballet, Bolshoi Confidential, was published by Liveright (W.W. Norton) in 2016, with additional translations and editions from Random House (Canada), Fourth Estate (UK), and Belfond (France). It was widely reviewed in major news outlets and shortlisted for the Book Prize of Pushkin House, London.
His biography of Lina Prokofiev Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev was featured on BBC Radio 4 (as "Book of the Week"), BBC World News (TV), and WYNC. Favorable reviews appeared in The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and The American Spectator.
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