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

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strict ideological context of the Soviet Union, the book could have developed into
something else, maybe even into a deeper and more interesting theory, containing
detailed references to general philosophical and scientific theories of the time. However,
I agree with McQuere in that, despite of Asaf’ev’s confusing style of language, both
books of Musical Form as Process stand as systematic presentation of his ideas,
analogous to his model for the evolution of music 391 .
I also align to Tull in that Asaf’ev did emphasize human communication more in
Intonation than in his earlier works. However, it was not a new quality in Asaf’ev’s
texts. He put an extra emphasis on it during the time of the socialist realism because he
needed to point out a closer connection between an abstract form and a social, “human”
content.
In a philosophical and music-aesthetical sense, the most important emphasis of Asaf’ev
was on the qualitative meaning of his terminology. This feature preserved throughout
his writings. The terms such as form as a process, simfonizm, intonation and melos 392 all
require some kind of a dynamical quality of music. Through that quality Asaf’ev
defined music’s content and aesthetical quality, or in Soviet terms, the “realist” quality
of music 393 .
According to Asaf’ev, realist quality in music laid in the right selection of intonations
that were typical for the given epoch 394 . Asaf’ev wrote that if an artist’s world-view was
not realistic his art may become either romantic or abstractly academic. In sum, the
musical emphasis on quality reduced in Intonation as music’s social nature became to
391 See McQuere 1983, p. 246.
392 In Musical Form as a Process Asaf’ev writes that melos includes melodiousness, connectness, and
dynamic quality “as the operation of forces which condition the sound experienced in the correlations of
pitches, in the purposeful interchange of tones, and in their conjugation. (Asaf’ev Muz.Fom. 1977, p. 541)
393 Asaf’ev talks about the situation on the field of musical criticism in Intonation and defines the concept
of Realism in art: “When I state that the sources and roots of the realistic in music lie in the intonational
communication of people, and in the recognition of these socializing elements of music in the
compositions of the musical past and present, I am trying to base the problem of musical realism on the
unquestionability of the experience of musical communication, on the continuously occurring process if
assimilation, evaluation, recognition and non recognition of music of ones’s environment.” (Asaf’ev:
Intonation 1977, p. 729.)
394 Ibid., pp. 731–732.