Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

without their context (musical work) and without a listener. 357 Thus for Asaf’ev as well
as for de Saussure, the relationship between a sign (musical sound) and its signifier (its
meaning) is arbitrary. There is no logical relationship between them. We cannot
understand language without its socially determined and confirmed context. I would say
that Asaf’ev’s poetic quality in music, i.e. the figurative content of music is parallel to
de Saussure’s linguistic value of a word 358 in that it incorporates different meanings but
does not, in itself, possess any meaning. This means that the meaning of a word, in any
specific context, can only be established by its difference in a context from its other
possible meanings 359 .
In a sense, Asaf’ev was a musical Formalist suggesting that sounds in themselves don’t
constitute a meaning, but in that case he didn’t talk about music. According to him,
formation of sounds is not yet music if there is no person to perceive it. In the book one,
Asaf’ev defines musical content basically by different musically qualitative terms such
as simfonizm. However, these statements were not enough to convince the Soviet
authorities of the “antiformalist” qualities of his ideas, i.e. that music in itself was a
human phenomenon. That’s why in the book Intonation, he went even further to
indicate the connection between music and life.
5.2 The Second Literary Period: Intonation (Book II)
Asaf’ev’s second writing period consists of monographs on composers such as Glinka,
Čajkovskij, the members of the ‘Mighty Five’, various Soviet composers and Western
classics such as Grieg, Mozart, Beethoven and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) (all of
whom represented favourable musical aesthetics). Asaf’ev’s wide range of texts
included also a book on folk music and ethnomusicology. Many of his works appear in
a praised anthology, which was published after his death: Izbrannye trudy (Selected
357
“Consequently, any musical presentation of sound, in order to become an intonation, cannot remain
isolated; it is either the result of an already given correlation, or it evokes by its appearance a subsequent
sound, for only then does musical motion occur with all its characteristics.” (Ibid., p. 544.) “The ear
becomes the measure of things in music. There are no abstract architectonics, no abstract visual formschemes.
(Ibid. p. 561.)
358
See Smith 1998, p. 116.
359
See ibid.
97