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

“revealing music socially in the process of its intoning”. According to him, an acoustic
medium which is not organized by the human consciousness does not constitute
music. 340 Asaf’ev compared musical form (a system of intonations) to language as a
social institution:
[m]usic is a chain of mutations, conditioned, not only by the immanent laws of
organization of the musical fabric, but also by the operation of social selection, which
assures the longevity of some intonations and the dying off of others [--] I perceive this
correlation of immanence and causality in music, not at all in the sense of a conditionality
of a purely popular order (on the contrary, popular music is most often a conservative and
inert factor, and there is no direct bridge from it to the highest stages of musical
formation, although there is sometimes a “leap” over a huge number of vile tastes). I
understand the causality in the same way in which the properties of linguistic mutation
are presented by the outstanding French linguistic, A[ntonie] Meillet, in his Linguistique
historique et linguistique générale (Paris, [E. Chapion] 1921, pp. 15–18) [--] In this light
it is quite possible to replace the concepts of linguistics, of language and its structure,
with the concepts of musical knowledge, music as a language, and its forms [--] 341
As pointed out earlier, Asaf’ev was moving towards more precise expression in his
theory building. Asaf’ev tried constantly to “bring his theory up to date“. Some changes
occurred also in book one, which indicate that Asaf’ev felt a need to fix and explain his
concepts in order to formulate them in more suitable forms for the current aesthetics. He
also dropped out some concepts that had become inappropriate to use. Changing
ideological atmosphere in the Soviet Union towards the Socialist Realist art theory
meant that the use of “mystical” language of symbolists and certain plurality in
philosophical sense started to be risky and, soon, out of question. In Musical Form as a
Process Asaf’ev rejected musical symbolism as one of the heritage of the formal
aesthetics: “From musical symbolism, however, there is no bridge to living musical and
340 “Even the most primitive stages of selection of the media of musical expression from among acoustical
phenomena; reveal the prolonged process of formation and the crystallization of that which is formed.”
Asaf’ev: Muz.Form. 1977, p. 187. This of course excludes animals as potential music enjoyers, but does
not exclude them as performers of music. Asaf’ev’s view is certainly wide and modern. It basically
includes all the sounds of nature to be music as long as someone considers them music i.e organizes them
through his or her consciousness to be a system of sound relationship which constitutes a meaning of
social or practical value. However, the main point here is of course Asaf’ev’s attempt to tie the new,
unfamiliar sounds of modern music to human life.
341 Asaf’ev: Muz.Form. 1977, pp. 31, 332, 583; see also Asaf’ev: Muz.Form. 1971, pp. 94–95.
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