The Ideas of the “Ohrenphilologie” in establishment of the Russian Theoretical Musicology of the 1920s: Boris Asafiev and the Researchers of the “Live Word” – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Tatyana V. BUKINA
Vaganova Ballet Academy
2 Str. Zodchego Rossi, Saint Petersburg, 191023, Russian Federation
Associate Professor
Doctor of Science (Art History)
e-mail: tbukina2002@mail.ru
ORCID: 0000-0001-6267-2775

The Ideas of the “Ohrenphilologie” in establishment of the Russian Theoretical Musicology of the 1920s: Boris Asafiev and the Researchers of the “Live Word”

Abstract: At a time of its institutionalization in post-revolutionary decade, Russian musicology was an active recipient of ideas, methods, and achievements of the related disciplines. The attention of the given article is drawn to one of such connections, significant for musicological thought of that period: an impact made on it by research of oral speech intonation carried out under the aegis of so called “Ohrenphilologie” (“auditory philology”). This impact is observed on the example of Boris Asafiev and, partly, his school at the Institute of Art History in Petrograd which maintained close collaboration with philologists and theater researchers from the Institute of the Live Word, one of the leading platforms of the Ohrenphilologie in Russia. A hypothesis is put forward that ideas of this direction influenced Asafiev’s concept of “sounding substance” which occupied an important place in his theoretical heritage of the 1920s. This phenomenon accumulated the key communicative, dynamic, and semantic parameters of music as well as sources of its psychphysiologic impact. In the course of comparative analysis it establishes continuity between ideas enunciated in the works of the specialists in Ohrenphilologie Vsevolod Vsesolodsky-Gerngross and Sergey Bernstein on the one hand, and Asafiev’s concept of the sounding substance on the other.

Key words: Russian musicology of the 1920s, Boris Asafiev, “sounding substance”, Ohrenphilologie, “music of oral tradition”.

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Asafiev, B.V. Spisok not i knig, priobretennykh i nalichnykh k priobreteniyu so 2 poloviny 1915 do nachala 1920 g.g. [The List of Sheet Music and Books purchased and available for purchase from middle 1915 to early 1915]. The Russian State Archive for Fiction and Arts, F. 2658 Ed. Khr. 440 op. 1. (In Russian).
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For Citation:

Bukina, T. (2023) The Ideas of the “Ohrenphilologie” in establishment of the Russian Theoretical Musicology of the 1920s: Boris Asafiev and the Researchers of the “Live Word”. International Journal of Cultural Research, 3 (52). 116–132. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_3_116

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_3_116