Lost Contexts: Echoes of the Organic Worldview in Boris Asaf’yev’s Research Methodology of the 1920s

According to a number of Boris Asaf’yev’s biographies, his formation as a musicologist was strongly influenced by Henri Bergson’s teaching on intuition and organic worldview. A question remains, however, to what extent and in what particular aspects Bergson’s doctrine affected his scholarly work. The present paper examines this question on the material of Asaf’yev’s scholarly methodology. The author comes to conclusion that the organic paradigm determined a number of its remarkable features, such as a priority given to unique qualitative parameters of musical tissue that are inaccessible to precise musical notation, a focus on auditory experience, a special attention to synesthetic connections of music.