Prince V. F. Odoevsky in search of “Russian harmony”

Abstract

The article examines the searching for national identity in the musical and critical heritage of Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky, which is associated with his philosophical interests and reflects his philosophical development after the “Society of Lyubomudriye” (“Society of Wisdom”) and “Russian nights”. The 19th century is the century of discovery of the national, and the culture and aesthetics of romanticism contributed to that discovery and led to intense nation-building. Odoevsky distinguishes between Russian and the so-called “general” Western European music, basing this distinction on the analysis of Old Russian singing. It is based on the system of Echos (“glas”) and Ecphonesis (“poglasitsa”), which is typologically close to the ancient Indian scales. He studies the “hook letter” (“Kryuki”) reform carried out in the 16th–17th centuries by Ivan Shaidurov and other “didascals”, comparing it with the activities of Guido of Arezzo in the West in the 11th century. Odoevsky perceives music, firstly, as an ordered system of mathematical patterns, that is confirmed by the ideas of Leibniz and Euler, and secondly, as a special spiritual reality associated with ascetic practices. Odoevsky connects the national in music not with an appeal to folk songs, and even less with its recording in the spirit of European harmony, but with a deep form of musical composition, associated with the specificity of musical neuma. Music turns out to be an integral part of the iconosphere, it correlates with architecture and other kinds of art. Odoevsky’s ideas were developed in the works of the contemporary Russian cultural philosopher and composer Vladimir Martynov. The article examines the controversy of Sergei Taneyev and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, in which Taneyev, continuing Odoevsky’s ideas, defends the concept of a special “Russian harmony” and builds his work strategy in accordance with that idea. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, stands for the unity of the European musical process, although he recognizes the national originality of various musical schools. Tchaikovsky’s statements about the contiguity of the Russian musical tradition with the European tradition were censored in the Soviet publication of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev correspondence (1951).