At the Origins of an Interrupted Tradition: Methodological Search in Soviet Historical Musicology of the 1920s

Abstract

The article discusses the stage of formation of the musicological research methodology in Russia. Similarly to a significant part of the humanitarian heritage of the 1920s which was persecuted during Stalin’s Great Break, this research tradition was largely lost and forgotten in the following decades, and currently remains undervalued, despite modern interest in this era. Meanwhile, in the decade after the revolution, significant and in many ways extraordinary results were achieved in this area, all the more impressive if to consider that the methodology of the history of music was created almost from scratch. This article reconstructs the main components of the music history paradigm of the 1920s based on methodological works by B.V. Asafiev, S.L. Ginzburg, B.L. Yavorsky, K.A. Kuznetsov, and N.F. Findeizen. Most of these works have never been republished, and several still exist only in manuscripts. The undertaken analysis results in a conclusion that in the period under consideration, Russian musicology had all the necessary prerequisites for the formation of an original research school in music history which actively accumulated the latest achievements of related disciplines. Herewith, many of research issues musicologists of that time were engaged in, the questions they posed, and the research directions they set have remained relevant.

Keywords

• russian musicology of the 1920s
• methodology of musicological research