The article examines the pedagogical heritage of Viktor Aleksandrovich Uspensky (1879–1949), the musician-ethnographer, composer and professor whose activity in Turkestan and Uzbekistan laid the foundations of the national system of professional music education, and determines the place of this heritage in the contemporary preparation of teachers. The author proceeds from the thesis that the pedagogical significance of Uspensky’s work is not confined to the history of a particular discipline and that it may be reconstructed as a system of transferable principles governing the relation between a national cultural tradition and institutional education. Relying upon the historical-biographical, comparative-analytical and hermeneutic methods together with pedagogical modelling, the study identifies five such principles: the primacy of the primary source and of direct contact with the bearers of a tradition; the transformation of tacit, orally transmitted knowledge into a form capable of institutional transmission; the synthesis of the academic method with the mentorship model of the oral-professional tradition; the inseparability of research from teaching; and the orientation of scholarly work towards the formation of national pedagogical cadres. These principles are correlated with L. Shulman’s conception of pedagogical content knowledge and with the theory of legitimate peripheral participation of J. Lave and E. Wenger. The limits of the heritage are also examined, and the conditions of its productive assimilation in the pedagogical higher education of Uzbekistan are determined.