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

Asaf’ev’s way of describing music was very spiritual, based on an artistic experience.
Yet he was also deeply interested in Russian religious past and different myths and
rituals related to it. Within reading Symphonic Etudes it seems that Asaf’ev possessed
both, a subjective and objective approach on his object of study and that is exactly the
feature what makes it hard to interpret him. His verbal illustrations of different operas
are attempts to reach something of the “magical artistic experience” that he himself
subjectively, i.e. intuitively experienced when listening and exploring the operas.
Although he wanted to capture the music by words he admitted that the only way to
really understand is through an empathy with music. Nevertheless, Asaf’ev also tried to
be an objective observer and applied the theories of Worringer, Lipps, Losskij and
Ernest Cassirer. He actually even apologises in A Book about Stravinsky his rather
passionate style and spontaneous admiration towards the music that sometimes carries
him away from the scientific frames 306 .
4.4 Asaf’ev’s relationship to modern music – A Book about Stravinsky
Two of the main themes in Asaf’ev’s production are the process of a musical
composition and the development in music and musical culture. Because of his interest
and writings on modern music, he was accused of formalism and modernist tendencies
at the end of 1920s. 307 Yet as David Haas has pointed out, one cannot form a full view
of Asaf’ev’s modernist aesthetic by focusing solely on his A Book about Stravinsky, the
profiles of Prokof’ev, Mjaskovskij, Berg and other representatives of modern music.
His ideas and special vocabulary are introduced and explained elsewhere in a series of
theoretical essays that culminate with the Musical Form as a Process (1930). 308
Nevertheless, Asaf'ev's theoretical essays are also very detached and loose without
reading concrete examples. I would say that Asaf’ev’s modernist ideas can be found
best from his early writings about Russian classics: Musorgskij, Rimskij-Korsakov, etc.
306 See the next Chapter.
307 Boris Jarustovskij has noted in the preface of the 1977 that Soviet publication that “it has been
particularly remembered when Asaf’ev’s book was judged from the RAPM’s side and later in 30s and 40s
by their offspring – amateurs oversimplifying and ‘straighten’ complex phenomenon of world art, and
that’s why none appreciated the book written in some other way.” (Asaf’ev: Stravinskij 1977, p. 3.)
308 Haas 1998, p. 54.
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