Boris Asafiev and soviet musical thought: Reputation and influence

Abstract

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev?s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev?s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev?s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev?s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discussions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev?s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev?s myriad intentions.

Second‐Order Topics and Prokofiev's String Quartets

“…Boris Asafyev, a close friend of Prokofiev's, proposed a somewhat elusive theory of ‘musical intonations’ which contains notable parallels. Although over the course of his life his concept of intonatsiia ranged from simply the succession of two chords to the expressive character of an entire sonata movement or even a composer's oeuvre, the most influential manifestation focused on extracting a ‘complex set of historical and national emotive meanings’ from the music, as Daniel Elphick describes (Elphick 2021, p. 62). Asafyev's focus on units of conventionalised socio‐cultural meaning parallels key tenets of topic theory (as noted in Monelle 1992, p. 226; Elphick 2021, p. 62; Khannanov 2018, p. 485 and Agawu 2008, p. 49), although it was often the foundation for a politically driven music criticism rather than analyses of earlier works.…”