Russian Musical Terms

[j_menz]

Can anyone point me at a decent Russian to English list of musical terms and composer names?

My actual Russian is pretty non-existent, my transliteration is tolerable, but I have umpteen volumes of Russian editions that I at times struggle to get basic direction on, including transcriptions where I can't always work out whose piece is being transcribed, who transcribed it or what it is, and other stuff where tempo/mood markings are more guesswork on my part than actual comprehension.

[enrique2point0]

I believe I have a music specific one (ie terms, etc). But this is a great all around tool I have been meaning to get into as I find myself in your same predicament, volumes and volumes of great rare Soviet music and no idea what's in there!
*note it's just the intro.  However the 'guide' is helpful should you decide to translate character by character. To access the dictionary, click the corresponding spot in the contents page. You'll be hyperlinked/redirected to the web tool. 
 

[j_menz]

Thanks. 

Not quite what I'm after, though.

I can already transliterate reasonably well, and I have a Russian-English dictionary.

I'm looking for something specifically musically oriented - a reasonably small number of pages of common terms/composers/pieces that I could rote learn or at least look up easily. The transliteration of composer names can be odd, and piece names likewise. I can manage the "usual suspect" list of composers, but outside the very mainstream things start to get a little hairy. Same with piece names - things like Prelude, Fugue, Waltz are OK, but once you get to titles that are translated, not just transliterated, I'm lost (or struggle to make sense from what the dictionary throws up).

[davidjosepha]

You could do what I'm doing and just start learning Russian! I'm not saying I'm doing it just because I love Russian music, but...

One term down and it's coming along reasonably well. Reasonably.

[flashyfingers]

You could always just ask your questions here…I would be happy to help with any translations.

Also, if you have a Russian keyboard, you could type the exact Russian word into the google translator or just google search the word, typed in Russian.

[j_menz]

if you have a Russian keyboard

Sadly not.

[flashyfingers]

Just scan or take a pic of the terms, and I can provide the translations. 

[enrique2point0]

this is the only one (or one of two, i have to check other personal archive records), i know of. this one i do not have but you might get traction by consulting your local lending institutions to see if they can assist:

Katayen, Lelia, and Val Telberg. Russian-English Dictionary of Musical Terms, by Lelia Katayen and Val Telberg. New York: Telberg book corporation, 1965.

[davidjosepha]

Sadly not.

You don't need a Russian keyboard to type Cyrillic characters. You can just go into the settings for your operating system and add Russian as a keyboard input alongside your English keyboard. You won't, obviously, have the letters on your keyboard to look down, but you can learn the layout pretty quickly and you can also print out a cheatsheet and keep it next to your computer (I used this when I was learning it).

[visitor]

i knew I had this somewhere. no idea where I got it.

this is the only one (or one of two, i have to check other personal archive records), i know of. this one i do not have but you might get traction by consulting your local lending institutions to see if they can assist:

Katayen, Lelia, and Val Telberg. Russian-English Dictionary of Musical Terms, by Lelia Katayen and Val Telberg. New York: Telberg book corporation, 1965.

 
 
 
 
 

[j_menz]

Perfect!  

[visitor]

Perfect!  

We aim to please.  If only it had composers !
 

[musikalischer_wirbelwind_280]

An alternative to davidjosepha's method, j_menz, is this online keyboard: https://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/russian.htm

It has the advantage of not making you learn a whole new layout in order to write in Russian, since most of the letters you type on your standard English keyboard will correspond to their Russian equivalents, so if you type, for ex., ' V ', the letter ' В ' will appear; if ' Z ', ' З ' and so on.

And the ones that do require some memorizing are not that hard because all of them are logical enough, phonetically speaking. For instance, to write ' Ж ' you need to type ' Z + H ', which is the way that Russian letter is usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet; if you want to write ' Щ ' you need only type ' SH + CH ', etc.

As someone who's studying a number of languages with different writing systems (Russian among them , I can tell you it's very handy and the best tool of this kind I've found so far because it really makes things much easier, and the good news is there are online keyboards for many more languages on that same site, just left-click where it says 'multilingual keyboard' (at the top of the page, in orange font) and voilà : Georgian, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, Japanese (using both, the syllabaries, and the kanjis), Chinese (using radicals or Pinyin, whichever you prefer) Coptic, and many more are there, too, and they all follow that same principle of always trying to save you the trouble of learning a completely (or almost) new keyboard layout.

Best!
M.W.