A skilled and imaginative, though conservative, Russian composer of the first half of the twentieth century, Alexander Gedike remains much more widely known in Eastern Europe than in the world at large. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Unlike Stravinsky, he did not embrace modernism of the early twentieth-century movement of futurism, and unlike Rachmaninov, he remained in Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik coup. Son of a piano instructor, Goedicke became a professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory. As a serious student of Bach, he preferred to preserve Classical virtues and strong counterpoint and became known as a champion of classical traditions. He rarely visited the West, but became known as an important performer and composer in Eastern Europe and still occupied his professor's seat at the Conservatory at the time of his death in 1957. Alexander Goedicke was Nikolai Medtner's first cousin. Alexander's father Fyodor Goedicke, a minor composer and pianist, was Medtner's mother's brother and his first teacher.