The revolution of 1917 and the phenomenon of soviet musicology

Abstract

The article is devoted to the early stage of the development of Soviet musicology and characterizes the role of research institutions created after 1917, and their influence on the subsequent development of Russian musicology. The focus is on such institutions as the Musical Department of the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), the State Institute for Musicology (GIMN), the State Academy for Art Studies (GAHN).

 The outstanding scientific achievements of the first generation of Soviet musicologists, such as Boris Asafyev, Nikolai Garbuzov, Georgi Konyus, Konstantin Kuznetsov, Leonid Sabaneyev, and Boleslav Yavorsky are especially remarkable. The versatile education of many of these scholars helped Soviet musicology to come closer to other branches of knowledge. While Yavorsky, Konyus, Konstantin Eiges had solely musical education, many others had qualifications in other fields in addition to those in music: Sabaneyev and Rozenov were physicists and mathematicians, Renchitsky was a lawyer, Ivanov-Boretsky was a lawyer, historian and philologist, Boris Asafyev was a historian and philologist, and Garbuzov was a geologist.

The article notes that in post-revolutionary years Russian musicology was institutionalized, with research institutions being given the leading role. Those institutions shaped a «way of life» for musicology that the latter still follows, e.g. the subject-based planning of research and the principle of collective writing. It is the emergence of the «professional personnel training» system that makes some modern scholars date the birth of Russian musicology back to the early post-revolutionary years.

KeyWords: Soviet musicology, the State Institute for Musicology(GIMN), the State Academy for Art Studies (GAHN).