In Memoriam Bozhidar Karastoyanov (10 June 1940–29 October 2023)

B ozhidar Penev Karastoyanov was born on 10 June 1940 in the village of Kule Makhala (Zlatia) in Bulgaria.Between 1954 and 1958 he studied at the music school in Varna.After graduating from the school, he entered the Sofia Conservatory in 1960 at the Faculty of Theory, Conducting and Composition, and from 1962 he continued his studies at the Faculty of Theory and Composition of the Moscow State Conservatory.In 1966 Karastoyanov graduated from the Conservatory with a degree in musicology and music theory and left for Bulgaria, where he taught solfeggio and music theory at the Music Pedagogical Institute in Plovdiv.Returning to Moscow in 1967, he began teaching theoretical subjects at the Boys' Choral Chapel at the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute.During this period he became interested in the study of church monody, with great support from S.S. Skrebkov and Y.V. Keldysh.In 1970 he became a junior researcher in the music sector of the Institute of Art History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he worked until 1985.In 1985 he returned to Bulgaria and in the same year he became a researcher at the Institute of Music of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia), where he worked until his retirement in 2005.Afterwards, Karastoyanov moved to Vienna, where he lived until the end of his life on 29 October 2023.Karastoyanov participated in many scientific conferences in Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Romania and Ukraine.He gave a number of courses and lectures in Sofia, Vienna, and Moscow.In 2001, Karastoyanov initiated, together with his daughter Maria Pischlger, the international musicological conference "Theory and History of Monody" in Vienna and was for many years the scientific director and co-author of publications of the proceedings of this scientific conference.Bozhidar Karastoyanov is the author of a large number of articles and monographs in the field of the theory of monody, neumatic notation, and structural analysis of monodic chants.Much of his work is devoted to the study of the melody of Russian Znamenny chant, the material of Old