JAVS Summer 2026

string teachers across the USSR agreed that the viola should not be a student’s first instrument, and that the transition to viola should occur only after four or more years of violin study. 12 This approach had already been adopted by Reitikh and other pedagogues and is evident in the khrestomatiya (chrestomathy) collections for grades 5–8, published beginning in 1953. These collections contained works suitable for young violists with at least four years of violin training but did not include pedagogical instruction. It was only with Reitikh’s School for the Young Violist (1987) that grade 5 students were systematically guided through the transition from violin to viola. 13 The last known Soviet pedagogical publication for viola was a chrestomathy of etudes published by Muzyka (Moscow) in 1990, compiled and edited by V. Murzin. It included approximately one hundred original or transcribed etudes from the Classical period onward and aimed to address a broad range of common and extended technical challenges. 14 About a decade after the collapse of the USSR, some schools and individual teachers

adopted the American approach—or, alternatively, readopted an earlier Soviet framework—of treating the viola as a first instrument. 15 The first known pedagogical publication explicitly supporting viola instruction as a first instrument was written by Y. Marom and published in St. Petersburg in 2008. 16 Compiling a comprehensive list of pedagogical materials for viola published during the Soviet era is difficult, as many sources remain inadequately catalogued in libraries or absent from written documentation. The table in Figure 3 presents a partial list of Soviet pedagogical publications for viola gathered during my doctoral research. It includes etude and scale books, as well as a selection of khrestomatiya (collections), primarily those compiled and edited by Reitikh. The complete list in my dissertation also includes collections of Soviet and non-Soviet works edited for students by leading Soviet viola pedagogues and published in the series Concert Repertoire for the Violist ( Kontsertnyy repertuar al’tista ) by the publisher Muzyka.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 42, Summer 2026 Online Issue