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

thoughts is to be given, living travels with people [..] do not avoid the beautiful
sounds..” 85 The “life-in-itself” became a criterion for art.
The new line turned out to be hard to follow. Imitation of the past was considered
ideologically wrong. The past critical realism needed to be positive realism because
critical realism was close to naturalism which was considered highly bourgeois. In 1934
the journal Sovetskaja Muzyka published an article called “The Development of
Cultures National in Form and Socialist in Content” which informed about Stalinist
Cultural Revolution. 86 According to the published code the Soviet composers had to
ensure that their music wasn’t “national” in content because that would imply to
bourgeois nationalistic art. “Only the outward forms, the technical means of expression,
might reflect the nationality of each republic, and even this was meant as a temporary
concession, until all the national tributaries could merge into a single mighty river of
international Soviet culture, socialist in both, in form and in content.” 87 Professor
Andrej Rudnev’s article in the journal Musiikki in 1947 is descriptive:
In those areas where people cannot compose their own music by themselves, the senior
Russians have compelled to go there and to teach the local musicians. They have even
themselves composed operas and other music at the beginning, by using the folk music of
the natives. 88
The central musical institutions i.e., the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories sent
their pupils to teach the locals in different Soviet Republics. Colonialist reforms
concerned also the traditional instruments that needed to be developed and should have
been brought closer to the “art music”. Although the change that occurred was often
quite slight, Vesa Kurkela has emphasized that in the extreme cases the musical
traditions became totally westernized and they lost all of their essential ethnic features.
85 Musorgskij, M. P. Literaturnoe nasledie. Pis’ma. Biografičeskie materially i dokumenty. Moscow,
1971, p. 207 quoted in Roziner 2000, p. 167.
86 Sovetkaja Muzyka 1934, p. 3 quoted in Frolova-Walker 1998, p. 334.
87 Ibid., p. 334. Frolova-Walker has quoted Stalin: “Under the conditions of a dictatorship of the
proletariat within a single country, the rise of cultures national in for and socialist in content had to take
plac,s o that when the proletariat wins in the whole world and socialism is apart of ordinary life, these
cultures will merge into one culture, socialist in both in form and in content with a common language –
this is the dialectics of Lenin’s approach to the issue of national culture.” (I.V. Stalin, Marksizism i
nacional’no-kolonial’nyj vopros. Moscow, 1932, p. 195.)
88 Rudnev 1947 Musiikki 1947 p. 1, 8 quoted in Kurkela 1985, p. 5.
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