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

a writer and critic. His literary works contained way more modern ideas than his rather
conventional music.
Belyj declared in “The Meaning of Art” that “the study of verbal orchestration must be
based on the application of the theory of music to the theory of poetry.” 208 Asaf’ev must
have read Belyj’s words when he wrote: “The substance of modern poetry is in its
‘musicalization’, in its aspiration in using words not like in the manner of understanding
or thinking, but in the manner, that they are sounding instrumental accords of an
idea.” 209 Parallel with Belyj’s musical desires, one can see Asaf’ev’s will to put the
processes of music in words. He wrote in 1916 that his dream was “to learn to
understand music so that he can translate all elements of a composition into words –
into ideas and concepts not by fantasizing, i.e. not in the sense of programmatic
commentary and explanations and not as technical analysis.” 210 In 1946 he wrote in
the journal Sovetskaja Muzyka, that he wrote about intonation almost aphoristically. 211
Asaf’ev, who was trained also as a philologist, wanted to describe the developmental
nature of music by words without using mere musical-theoretical terminology. The
theory of music was present in him as the logic of the text, but the terminology was
adopted from literature. This passage invites also to a comparison with the ideas of
Henry Bergson, who thought that the role of the philosopher was to find the right
combination of metaphors drawn from the physical world that could induce an
individual to reflect on the continuity of his consciousness 212 . By times Asaf’ev even
formed new neologisms, such as “apostolyj-pioner” (which is rather controversial in
meaning). In Symphonic Etudes Asaf’ev identified music with “a reflection of the truth
of life, soul” and determined intoned musical sound as experienced, emotionally
comprehended, ‘vosčyvstvovannoe’ word 213 . Vosčyvstvovat’ is an old Russian verb that
means “to feel”. A free translation of Asaf’ev’s word would be thus something like
‘sentient word’. Several examples of the same kind can be found from Asaf’ev’s texts.
208
This article was published in his book Simvolizm p. 221 in 1910; quoted in ibid., p. 47.
209
Asaf’ev: Simf.E 1970, p. 201.
210
This is quoted by David Haas in his book Leningrad’s modernists: studies in composition and musical
thought, 1917–1932. The same sentence is quoted in Biography 1984, p. 85. It is stated by Asaf’ev’s in
his letter to Raiskij in 15 th of May in 1916 and published in the journal Muzykal’naja žizn’.
211
Asaf’ev 1946, p. 92.
212 See Haas 1998, p. 57.
213 See Asaf’ev: Simf.E 1970, p. 195.
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