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

forties towards the Soviet cultural rulers of which he himself became part of – willingly
or unwillingly.
The Book about Stravinsky contains lots of characteristics adopted from the texts of
Russian modernists, such terms as ‘dynamism’, ‘intensity’ and ‘musical speech’ 320 as
well as ‘the creative energy of an artist’, ‘the creative experience’, ‘organic
development’ 321 , ‘art and life’ 322 (Žiznetvorčestvo), etc. Asaf’ev wrote A Book about
Stravinsky almost simultaneously with the more theoretical book Musical Form as a
Process. Many of the concepts and theoretical terms developed there appear already in
the analyses of Stravinskij’s music such as the term intonation.
In his mature texts Asaf’ev extended the meaning of intonation from the conventional
understanding of the term in his youthful texts: “exactitude in performance, purity of a
sung or played sound” 323 into something wider, towards extra musical meanings. In A
Book about Stravinsky Asaf’ev defines intonation as “the totality of sounds from
whatever source, not only the audible music but the whole phenomenon of sound,
actually or potentially audible as music.“ To intone, means to define a system of soundrelationships.
324 Asaf’ev called his method the intonation analyses where an important
place is given to melos. Asaf’ev stated that the Russian melos is “the living speech of
Stravinskij, his native language, and not just material from which he takes quotations.”
He also explained the general European intonation system trough his analyses and
stated “Stravinskij’s intonational sphere had come to include the general European
musical language [--] joined this with the Russian melos which, thus, for Europe had
ceased to be some sort of exotic monster and was realizing itself in an organically
developing complex of musical intonations.” 325
In the text of Stravinskij’s opera Mavra, intonation refers to the content of a musical
composition. This function is stressed also in the first book Intonation, but in a very
320 Asaf’ev 1982: Stravinsky, see p. 208.
321 Ibid, see p. 204
322 Ibid, see pp. 202, 205.
323 Dictonary of the most important Musico-Technical Terms (1919) quoted in Haas 1998, p. 60.
324 Asaf’ev: Stravinsky 1982, p. 7.
325 Ibid., p. 7–8.
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