Musin was born in the provincial town of
Kostroma. His mother died when he was 6; his father, a watchmaker and music lover, encouraged him to become a
pianist. Musin first studied conducting under
Nicolai Malko and
Alexander Gauk. He became assistant to
Fritz Stiedry with the
Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra in 1934. The Soviet government later sent him to lead the Belarusian State Academic Symphony Orchestra, but then curtailed his conducting career because he never joined the
Soviet Communist Party. He spent 1941–45 in
Tashkent,
Uzbekistan, where most Russian intellectuals were kept safe during the war. There he continued conducting and teaching. On June 22, 1942, the anniversary of the
Nazi invasion, he conducted
Shostakovich's
Leningrad Symphony. In 1932 Musin was invited to teach conducting at the
Saint Petersburg Conservatory, then known as the Leningrad Conservatory. There he developed a comprehensive theoretical system to enable the student to communicate with the orchestra with the hands, requiring minimal verbal instruction, which is still referred to as the "Leningrad school of conducting". No one had previously created such a detailed and clear system of conducting gestures. His own early experiences as a student had prompted him to study the intricacies of manual technique: when Musin had tried to enter Malko's conducting class at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1926, he had been denied entrance because of poor manual technique. He was eventually accepted into Malko's class, and became an authority on manual technique, describing his system in his book
The Technique of Conducting (Техника дирижирования). Musin described the main principle of his method in these words: "A conductor must make music visible to his musicians with his hands. There are two components to conducting, expressiveness and exactness. These two components are in dialectical opposition to each other; in fact, they cancel each other out. A conductor must find the way to bring the two together." ==Notable students==