B. V. Asafiev at the beginnings of "ballet music studies": Technology of discovery
The article is devoted to endeavor of the outstanding musicologist Boris Asafiev in the sphere of ballet studies. A hypothesis that Asafiev became a founder of a new research field in Russian musicology, which one can call “ballet music studies”, is proposed: in his works ballet music was for the first time comprehended as a distinct genre invested with a high esthetic value that made it a worthy subject of musicological analysis. In this essay, Asafiev’s research strategy is consistently reconstructed; it is discovered how his theoretical conceptions of “symphonysm” and “intonational vocabulary of epoch” fostered his re-estimation of composers’ ballet inheritance. The proposed survey is fulfilled with the use of biographic and institutional analysis.