His father Alexander Borisovich descended from an old-line noble family. His mother Elizaveta Ivanovna Arapova (Merz) was a daughter of a well-known architect Ivan Alexandrovich Merz and a great-great granddaughter of a famous inventor Ivan Petrovich Kulibin.

In 1930, he graduated from the Leningrad Conservatoire, at the Composition Class of Prof. V.V. Shcherbachev. People’s Artist of the R.S.F.S.R., Boris Arapov taught students at the Composition Department, had headed the same Department since 1974; he brought up a number of Soviet and foreign composers and musicologists; among them: Sergey Slonimsky, Wladislaw Uspensky, Vladimir Tsytovich, Yury Falik, Alexander Kneifel, Isaac Schwartz, Leonid Desyatnikov, Sergey Belimov, and Stefan Dragostinov (Bulgaria). Compositions by Arapov were widely performed in the U.S.S.R. and abroad; many of them were recorded at vinyl discs, CD and published.

In 1970s—1980s, Boris Alexandrovich Arapov was the acknowledged head of the Leningrad composers’ school. He was invited to the first night of all new compositions of all of his numerous students. Performances of his own compositions were always special events of the musical life, as well as festivals of the spirit of musical creativity which was characteristic for Arapov’s works.

The list of his compositions is rather long. New ideas were shaped and implemented without hurry, the master worked over his compositions up to the level of perfection. In spite of a broad circle of genders of his creative field, there are only few miniatures and small forms among the works by Arapov. His plans and ideas were always of large scale.

His virtuoso mastery of the orchestra, his attention to all the drama of the timbre colors, does not become an end in itself, as if avoiding a special show. But at the same time, it works in full force in shaping an integral composition, giving rise to images of almost cinematic tangibility. Possessing all the tools of composing technique, all the types of modern harmonic thinking, he has never subordinated his creation to some uniform method of composition. Very strictly, with great selection and impeccable taste, he created the musical matter he needed, from which an image would be molded, finding its exact place in the harmonious dramaturgy of the whole. A kind of aristocratic taste, which directs the permissiveness of modern means and forms into a code of strict expediency and pithiness, was the criterion of excellence that determined the status of Arapov as the head of the school.

The image of the patriarch-artist unwittingly suggests a certain burden of orthodoxy. This may apply to manypersons, but not to Arapov. He was always ahead. Acute rhythms and timbres, sharp plots - this was the high intensity of the intellectual life of the artist and man. Already beyond his 60th anniversary, in 1960-s, he created an absolutely nonconformist, strong and sophisticated in terms of language chamber musical and stage diptych: the opera novel “Rain” based on the story by Somerset Maugham (1967) and the two-act ballet “The Picture of Dorian Gray” after Oscar Wilde ( 1971). Peculiarities of certain characters, stage situations, psychological and landscape sketches were all done concisely and swiftly, figuratively and succinctly – in a truly symphonic way; everything was based on beautiful and memorable material.

Violin (1964), a concert for a large symphony orchestra, and a concert for violin, piano and percussion with a chamber orchestra in the memory of I.F. Stravinsky (1973). Written over the course of a decade, as if framing the chamber-stage diptych, they were connected with it with figurative and stylistic threads. The instrumental concert, which presupposes the personification of the instruments as actors, gave the composer a space for brightly dramatizing symphonic acts. The music of his concerts (by the way, as well as the Fifth Symphony, written in 1981) can be ‘materialized’ with sharply plot action or film action. At the same time, the music of the “Rain” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” will not lose in its completeness and independence in isolation from stage in a purely symphonic performance (as it was evidenced by the Choreographic poem based on the novel by O. Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray”).

An appeal to the texts of the New Testament has been always significant for the artist. For Arapov it was filled with deep meaning. One of the essential traits of the composer’s personality was his ability to empathize, to feel the pain of his time. That very deep inner need to capture a picture of a hard spiritual rift that distorted the fate of mankind in the last decades of the 20th century and shook the artist became the base and the source of creation for his “Music for Cello, String Orchestra, piano and percussion instruments” (The Revelation to John the Theologian). The artistic world of this work reveals to the listeners the tragical collision of the prophecies to John the Theologian (“soon, coming soon, and My retribution with Me — 22, 12) with the fatal chronicle of our time.