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

consciousness inherent in the ordinary human being, Skrjabin apparently surmounted the
barriers of human consciousness and often touched and grasped [--] the sphere of the
superhuman, without sensing the corporeality and the terror of death associated with it [--
] Skrjabin does not draw us anywhere, does not call us [--] He resides and drawing on
incredible power, forces the listener to transfer into the same kind of trance. And he has
achieved these conditions very easily: he has somehow not noticed concrete life and not
sensed that he is outside it or outside its immanent norms. And abiding in religious zeal,
he could go down to hell, touch the abominations of depravity and nevertheless remain in
‘ecstasy’, in a static sojourn, in blindness. Skrabin’s sphere of sound can most accurately
be described as a poem-like quality woven from desires to be lost in ecstasy (by means of
narcotics – even if only of a spiritual order of course) and from a sojourn in it. Skrjabin
has no will of his own, and therefore there is no symphonism, no continuity of musical
consciousness, though there is all the same an impersonal, insane dissolution in the
sphere which to him is concrete and ideal. The phenomenon of Skrjabin is a historic
wonder [--]” 274
The concept of poetic quality in music is here quite obscure. Anyhow, it appears on
Asaf’ev many times also in his later texts. When Asaf’ev talks about Skrjabin’s
“’distinctive objectivism’ of acceptance of a supra-personal inspiration”, he emphasizes
Skrjabin’s poetic quality in music. According to Asaf’ev, Skrjabin’s music does not
contain simfonizm, because he has given up his personal will. Skrjabin’s musical
inheritance can lead in the direction of turning this poetic quality of his into simfonizm,
which means a return to the dominance of personal elements asserting one’s own will
far above anything else. 275 Thus poetic quality has something to do with the
supernatural powers, which dominates the artist whereas simfonizm is something more
intellectual created in ones subjective consciousness. Here one asks where the intuition
stands. However yet in his later work Musical Form as a Process (1930) Asaf’ev talks
about poetic images, but there he refers to the figurative content of music. His tone has
gone over all into more formal direction and he defines his concepts more precise. Also
his attitude towards the musical symbolism has changed (see the Chapter 5.1).
Asaf’ev explains that the true simfonizm is a continuity of musical consciousness, each
given moment of which are being derived from the preceding one. It can never be only a
274 Ibid., pp. 240–241.
275 See Ibid., p. 249.
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