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

their informative side is not considered in detail. Moreover they are exploited by
Western scholars. 178
Orlova has listed in her preface to the book Symphonic Etudes (1970) many musical
figures who had their share on Asaf’ev’s mind and who are easy to accept: Stasov and
Serov as the representatives of the music-aesthetical heritage of the 19 th century. 179
Major influences on him were his teachers at the Conservatory Ljadov and Rimskij-
Korsakov and his fellow students Mjaskovskij and Prokof’ev. Sergej Taneev (1856–
1915) was one of the biggest influences to the whole generation of musicians of that
time, not least to Asaf’ev, who dedicated many writings to him 180 .
The major influences on Asaf’ev in the music-theoretical field were Boleslav Javorskij
and German musicologist Ernst Kurth (1886–1946) whose musical theories, influenced
by Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel (1770–1831), represented opposite to a static and schematic
approach to formal analysis. Kurth was seen in a particularly negative light by Soviet
scholars, because his theories were influenced by “idealist philosophies” (i.e.
philosophies which reject the objective existence of matter) such as Wilhelm Ostwald’s
(1853–1932) ”energetic-monistic” philosophy and Schopenhauer’s concept of “Will” as
an essence of man. 181
Schopenhauer used Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) differentiation of conceptual
thinking and sensory experience giving higher estimation to the latter. He considered
that conceptual thinking was only an instrument for practical life related to his strong
will-to-live. According to Schopenhauer one of the goals of philosophy was to free
human from conceptual thinking which was directed to fulfill the physical needs of
human. He saw that there were two ways to avoid it: 1. through an ascetic denial of the
will-to-live and 2. through an aesthetical contemplation, which was oriented
178
For example David Haas has been quite lazy in writing references to Orlova’s texts. Following Orlova,
which he does not always clearly indicate, he has pointed out (1992, p. 412) that Asaf’ev’s early writings
owed much to the philosophy of Bergson (1896, 1907) and to the Neo-Kantian thoughts.
179
Those two were praised in the Soviet Union. See for example Ryžkin: Russkoe Klassičeskoe
muzykoznanie v bor’be protiv formalizma. Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe
izdatel’stvo, 1951.
180
See for example Pamjati Sergeja Ivanoviča Tanejeva 1856–1946. (Protopopova, Blačeslav, Ed.)
Moscow: Muzgiz, 1947.
181
Tull 1977, pp. 166–167.
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