Biografia autore
Boris Asaf’ev (1884-1949) was a composer, writer, music critic, one of founders of Soviet musicology. He studied music by himself and later with Rimskii-Korsakov and Anatolii Liadov at St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Starting from the 1910s, he devoted himself to criticism, writing under the pseudonym of Igor’ Glebov. He directed the Music sector of the Institute of Art History, and starting from 1925 he directed the faculty of Music history and theory at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. He was among the animators of the Leningrad Association for Contemporary Music. In the late 1920s he concentrated on composition: among his best remembered works are the ballets Plamia Parizha (Flames of Paris, 1932) and Bakhchisaraiskii fontan (The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, 1933). In 1943 he left the sieged Leningrad and moved to Moscow, where he directed the research program of the Conservatoire and the music department of the Art History Institute. In these years, he signed the second volume of his treatise Muzykal’naia forma kak protsess (The Musical Form as a Process, 1947, the first having been issued in 1930). In his last years he presided the Union of Soviet Composers.