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

musical rhythm into the sphere of Logos, since from the olden tmes at the heart of the
search of contemporary philosophy one can find peculiaries to the soul of musical
origin. 296
With the comparison to Šumanovskij’s style, Asaf’ev explains his own “symbolist”
method which fuses features and means from the sphere of literature, philosophy and
music. He emphasizes:
I ask you to pay attention to a notion that art – poetry, music, painting, architecture,
theater – doesn’t mean the same in their essence as understading of musical, poetic,
picturesque, tragical. Since a line of poetry can be more or less musical, music can be
picturesque or poetic and so on. 297
It is interesting, as Fink has pointed out, that in Russian tradition words themselves are
somewhat suspect because of their usual reliance on purely intellectual means of
comprehension. 298 This feature is present also on Asaf’ev. However, together with
music, and especially when put into an artistic form such as opera, they reach something
that Asaf’ev admired the most. In this concept there is also the core of his theory of
Intonation: to reflect the truth of life through an intoned musical sounds, which
originates in Russian speech. In Symphonic Etudes this intoned sound means
“experienced, emotionally-perceived/comprehended word” which was developed
according to Asaf’ev gradually on Glinka and Dargomyžskij, and which reached its
perfection in Musorgskij’s music 299 . In this idea lays also one of the most important
features of socialist realism in music.
Another trait that did descend from Symbolists to socialist realism is some kind of a
“religious” attitude. However, during the socialist realism it was not directed towards
some mystical world beyond or towards the Kingdom of God but towards real life. In
other words, art needed to be based on people’s real life and not to reach some mystical
kingdom. The development from mystical attitude towards more practical attitude is
inherent on Asaf’ev. In Symphonic Etudes the religious attitude towards art appears in
296 Ibid., p. 253.
297 Ibid., p. 130.
298 Fink 1999, p. 9.
299 Asaf’ev: Simf.E 1970, p. 195.
83