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

Nevertheless, the socialist system influenced more on the surrounding culture than on
music itself. 89
The creation of music was seen as any industrial process. Composers were thus
“culture-workers” and they were expected to serve the state as the members of a
collective. They received special assignments from the Party. The main mouthpiece on
musical issues was the journal Sovetskaja Muzyka that corresponded with the
“unanimous Soviet Public opinion”. The favorable themes set by the Party were heroic
“drama of the people” and the national epic. It was especially important to emphasize
the Russian “origin” in music. 90 Thus the Soviet composers were in front of serious
difficulties. They had to compose music that would include the following features:
1. party-minded nationalism which avoids the bourgeois nationalism
2. party-minded realism which avoids the bourgeois naturalism thus
sustaining a positive utopia
3. an actual party-minded heroic theme (especially in opera)
4. music had to be understood by the wide masses, but was not to be
guilty of too much vulgar simplicity (as RAPM had done) or too much
symphonic development (as ASM had been guilty of) that would make
music too abstract
Every instruction turned out to be very hard to follow in relation to the form and
content. According to the code music had to be easily accessible and contain
‘pesennost’ [songfulness, melodiousness] or ‘raspevnost’ [singfulness]. In practice this
meant usage of the old revolution tunes such as “Marseilles” renamed as “Workers
Marseilles” and the usage of such material even in classical symphonies. 91
Melodiousness meant also returning to the Romantic tradition, although only in an
aesthetical sense. The Romantic worldview had been strictly rejected as an ideology
because it was held too elitist and bourgeois. Hacobian has stated that the socialist
realism could be divided into two different meanings: its “empirical” nature was
89 Ibid., p. 6.
90 Frolova-Walker 1998, p. 336.
91 Roziner 2000, pp.167–168.
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