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

abstraction, searches an integral synthetic function of art based on its own aspiration.
Music as the most intuitive art, closest of all to mental life and direct sources of life,
possessing growing and besides that, more flexible substance, because it is deformed and
unfolds in time (in which connection, thicken with sounds in time which means, in time,
organizing the very music into a moment, flow and into a period of its sounding) – music,
without doubts, has to rule over consciousness of modern humanity and apply its
influence to all spheres of other ramifications of art. This influence is easy to observe by
all who are familiar with recent tendencies in modern poetry and painting [--]. 260
David Haas has claimed that the influence of the fundamental thesis of Bergson’s
metaphysics on Asaf’ev is evident in the articles written during the period 1916–1922.
Haas has noted that Asaf’ev had similar view with Bergson on the nature of
consciousness and that he as well believed that the fundamental aspect of one’s
comprehension of reality is subjective, that the motion of reality (la durée) could only
be perceived intuitively. Asaf’ev applied Bergson’s theory to a perception of music by
hearing what he held superior to a mere visual experience of a score, incapable of giving
the whole of music. Another important adoption by Asaf’ev was his understanding of
reality under a continuous change. It inspired him in his comprehension of a musical
form as a process. 261 Musical form was to Asaf’ev a totality that was in motion (la
durée) and was perceived by hearing (comprehended intuitively by the listener).
However, in his comprehension Asaf’ev fused also Lipps’ concept of emphatic
projection.
The auditory experience/perception was most important to Asaf’ev in observing music.
It can be identified with the intuitive experience/perception so that 1. it is subjective i.e.,
it happens in the consciousness of an individual; 2. it reaches something about the
musical process and about the composers’s form-thinking that can not be (according to
Asaf’ev) reached through mere visual intellectual perception, i.e. through reading the
score. Asaf’ev’s interpretation includes also a hidden idea insisting that the perceiver of
the music has to be as creative and intelligent as the composer in order to comprehend
the music i.e., to recreate it in one’s consciousness. As Haas has written:
260 Asaf’ev: Simf.E 1970, p. 201. The italics are mine.
261 Haas 1998, pp. 58–60.
71