Abstract
Although the merits of the major Soviet musicologist Boris Asafiev to the sociology of art are obvious, usually his system of studying melody and intonation as social phenomena is seen as a problematization of musical art rather than as a stimulus for his own thought. Using the example of Asafiev’s opera criticism from 1914 to 1947, I prove that his sociology of art was a constructivist system that focused on the permanence of implicit aesthetic notions such as manner and style, while allowing for variability in the explicit reference concepts of criticism. The ideological pressure to construct national character and the historical unity of popular life allowed him to reinterpret studio opera as a way of isolating its supra-personal principles, and by asserting the historical and transitory nature of opera art, to protect its sustained rhetorical potential. The unity of the rhetorical and melodic elements of opera, declared by Asafiev to support the work of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, was the dynamic formula that led to the development of a new sociology of art, which can be compared with the current actor-network models.
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