During his student years, Tarnopolski entered the so-called “Denisov circle” of composers, who assumed an alternative position in regard to the official standards of the Soviet ideology and in the late 1980s formed the active core of the artistic group of the Association of Contemporary Music No.

Hana Adjiashvili, Olga Bochikhina, Mikhail Buzin, Georgy Dorokhov, Orhan Gashimov, Sebastian Elikovsky-Vinkler, Olga Rayeva, Anton Safronov, Alexandra Filonenko, Alla Kesselman, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Jamilia Jazylbekova, Nikolai Khrust, Balasagyn Musayev, Roman Parkhomenko, Pavel Polyakov, Felix Profos, Kirill Shirokov, Madlen Styskal, Ramazan Yunusov and many others.

One of the chief directions of Tarnopolski’s curatorial work has been the revival back into the concert repertoire of the undeservedly forgotten music of the early Russian avant-garde period.

A number of his concerts and festivals featured sensational discoveries – premieres of compositions pertaining to the time period from the 1910s to the early 1930s, including the first Russian Chamber Symphony composed by Nikolai Roslavets (1933), previously unperformed fragments of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose (1928), works by Nikolai Obukhov, Yefim Golyscheff, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Arthur Lourié, Evgeny O. Gunst, Wladimir Vogel, etc.

Tarnopolski’s music has been performed by such well-known musicians as Mstislav Rostropovich, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Jurowski, Ingo Metzmacher, Silven Kamberling, Reinbert de Leeuw, Alexander Lazarev, Natalia Gutman, Jens Peter Maintz and many others.

He regularly reads lectures and conducts master classes in Russia, Austria, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, USA and other countries, including such universities as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and others.

He has been invited as a composer-in-residence into the most significant institutions for contemporary art and science, among the most important of which were the Civitella Ranieri (Italy, 2015) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany, 2017–2018).

The music always creates the impression that it contemplates about its own sounds from an observation deck, at the same time, not only discerning the sonorities themselves, but also, what is more important, consciously operating with its meanings.”[9] In his compositions Tarnopolski frequently brings together artistic and political discourses, similarly to the way in its curatorial activities he carried this out during the course of many years.