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

The discussion of a content of music is left almost wholly to the second book, but
already in the first one Asaf’ev sets the basis for it. The basic idea appears for example
in his definition of a concept of music’s poetic quality which turns out to mean
something quite different than it does in his earlier writings. In Musical Form as a
Process the poetic quality is related to figurative quality in music. As Tull has pointed
out in his commentary, Asaf’ev does not suggest that figurative content would be an
immanent property of music, but rather that it is an associative phenomenon, related to
extra-musical concepts 353 . Asaf’ev wrote:
Each epoch works out in operatic, symphonic, and song creation, a certain sum of
“symbolic” intonations (sound complexes). These intonations spring up in invariable
conjunction with poetic images and ideas, with concrete sensations (visual or muscularmotor),
or with the expression of affects and various emotional conditions, i.e., in mutual
“coexistence” with these factors. Thus extremely strong associations are formed, which
are not inferior to meaningful verbal semantics. A sound image – an intonation which has
taken on the significance of a visual image or concrete sensations – evokes an
accompanying idea. 354
According to Asaf’ev, certain kinds of intonation habits are acquired through several
generations. They gradually become blunted as do the associations and semantics
connected to them, which expose their conditional nature. 355
Asaf’ev tried to explain the musicological approach to be similar to linguistics and to
lift the musical system of intonations to the same level with the language system. 356
According to him, musical sounds were not meaningful, i.e. they were not intonations,
353 Ibid., p. 598.
354 Ibid., p. 562.
355 Ibid., p. 556.
356 “There is no doubt that the music became a language, a sphere of the expression of feelings, and a
manifestation of thought, as it is now perceived, under the influence of a series of stimuli which were not
at all limited to those of an emotional order, although to deny the influence of the contrast of feelings
experienced by man on the organization of musical phenomena seems to me impossible. However,
systems of intoning, which have been justified by the experience of centuries, undoubtedly possess
immanent properties of organization (which continuously ‘readjust’ to reality, as the highest criteria of
their significance or force.” (Ibid., p. 554.)
96