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

continuity. 267 In order to understand basics of Asaf’ev’s ideas in concrete sense, it is
useful to take a closer look at his article “Pathways into the Future”.
Asaf’ev approaches Russian musical current from the past and goes through its
European roots and the heritage of Russian intelligentsia. As a result, he sets a question:
“Where is the face of our music” and what are the pathways into the future? 268
According to him, despite the big influence of German music, Russian classical music
contains certain Russian peculiarities. For instance, how the ancient folksong, with a
combination of Western norms, has resulted in the so-called dilettante-Russian style,
beloved of all Russian composers? Asaf’ev formulations bring forth language typical to
his later works he sates: “the element of melos infected the pale schemes [meaning
Western methods] with its vital impulse and created seductive mirages of genuine folk
art (Rimskij-Korsakov’s Kitež, Borodin’s Prince Igor and Ljadov’s Kikimora).” 269
Asaf’ev’s classification of Russian composers expressed in the article is very
interesting. For example Čajkovskij and Musorgskij are, according to him, the only
composers who cannot be reproved for adopting a false approach to folksong. Asaf’ev
takes a closer look at the individual Russian composers and speculates the possible
pathways leading from them to the future. He evaluates the total creativity of individual
composers, not just their works or style, but their whole artistic attitude, psychological
aspects: their creative personality. Roughly speaking, Asaf’ev divides composers into
two categories: subjective and objective, which he calls different degrees of
psychologism. 270 By this he means that the utmost objectivity leads to psychological
indifference 271 while the extreme subjectivity leads to egoism. 272 Although Bergson’s
267 Biography 1984, p. 86.
268 Asaf’ev: Pathways 2003, p. 236.
269 Ibid., p. 238.
270 “[w]ith regard to the content of musical consciousness, which take shape as the course of a single
creative process, but in which at times the personal state of soul is predominant (that means, the creative
impulses are rooted in the egoism of the composer, in his mental states), and in other times they are
reflection of perceptions introduced from outside, from the sphere of the super-human world.” (Ibid., p.
242.)
271 “From there arises a perception of the cosmos as static, which schematizes everything on one plane
and accepts even the spiritual quality itself (the upsurge of life) at the stage of motionless concentration.
Composers with this cast of creative thought are usually inclined to make music geometrical.” (Ibid., p.
246.)
272 See ibid.
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