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

“mass songs” with ideological texts, usually written by poets allied in the homologous
organization of proletarian writers. As Neil Edmunds has pointed out, the attacks of
RAPM’s musicians towards the musicians of ASM influenced on socialist realist
musical rhetoric in many ways. The Soviet swear words ‘formalist’ and ‘leftist’ which
had their origins in literature were first used in music by the members of Proletarian
groups such as RAPM. They were used to accuse the members of ASM of their Western
capitalistic and modern influences. 68 The Party Resolution of 23.4.1932 ordered all the
independent artistic organizations to be replaced with centralized “creative unions”,
which started to function under the doctrine of socialist realism in 1934. The central
musical fractions were Moscow Union of Composers and its branch Leningrad Union of
Composers. They were unified in 1948 and renamed into Union of Composers of the
USSR. 69
Many scholars have argued over the matter about which terms should be applied to the
culture that preceded the socialist realism and which should be used when determining
the culture after launching the term socialist realism. The dispute has concerned
especially the French term avant-garde, which is generally defined as a vanguard or a
new artistic movement. According to Taruskin neither Skrjabin, Prokof’ev, Stravinsky,
nor ASM, which supported the performances of Western modern music in Russia,
belonged to the avant-garde, because their intuition was based on tradition despite the
fact that they were advancing it. Taruskin writes that the only true representative of the
20 th century musical avant-garde in Russia was RAPM because it wanted to turn its
back to tradition and to create totally new Soviet music. It declared to be
antimodernistic, antiwestern, antijazz but also antifolkloristic, and antitraditional. 70
However, as Edmunds writes, the rejection of tradition never really happened in
practise. The concerts that were directed to workers included music of Nikolaj Rimskij-
Korsakov (1844–1908), Aleksandr Borodin (1833–1887), Robert Schumann (1810–
1856) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Many of the members of RAPM composed music
68 Edmunds 2003, p. 4. The idea of formalism in musical aesthetics was launched most clearly by Eduard
Hanslick in his work Vom Musikalich-Schönen 1854.
69 Hakobian 1998, pp. 16, 41–42, 45; Roziner 2000, p. 171.
70 Taruskin 1998, pp. 86–93.
24