MUSIC — EIDOS — TIME. ALEKSEI LOSEV AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF TODAY’S MUSICOLOGY (presentation of a book [4])

Authors

• Konstantin Zenkin Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev was the most significant philosopher (phenomenologist, dialectician) and, philologist in the twentieth-century Russia, who had inherited spiritual traditions of the Silver Age, first of all,, from Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivánov and Father Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky. An Orthodox-Christian Neo-, Platonist and the follower of onomatodoxy, he went through the GULAG during the 1930s and later was forced, to imitate his sincere devotion to the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism; however, prior to his arrest, he had, written an entire series of significant works on music: Music as a Subject of Logic, Two Worldviews, The, Musical Representation of Love and Nature, The Formation of the Artistic Worldview, Philosophical, Commentaries on Richard Wagner’s Music-dramas, Essay on Music, Skryabin’s Philosophical Worldview,, Musical Aesthetics in the Ancient World, the Historical Significance of Wagner’s Aesthetic Outlook and A, Fundamental Issue in the Philosophy of Music [3]. However, the primary focus of this research is not only and, not so much on these works. Having topicalized the methods of ancient and medieval (Byzantine) philosophy,, as well as having combined them with those contemporaneous to Losev, he managed to discover some new, opportunities for art studies; therefore, in order to comprehend Losev’s oeuvre in all its depth and specificity,, not only the named works but also The Dialectics of Artistic Form, The Dialectics of Myth and The Philosophy, of the Name, as well as The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science, need to be learnt first of all., Another reason of widening the research topic was determined by its task, which is not only to show, Losev’s importance and resource of his scholarly methods, which has not yet been in use, but also to draw, attention to some aspects of today’s scholarship in which these methods can function with especial, fruitfulness. Therefore, “the perspective of today’s musicology” is another extreme of this research, which is, relatively independent but still lies within the circle of Losev’s ideas., Losev was a philosopher of music rather than a music theorist, as he raised and answered the, question what music is. Yet, Doctor Yuri Nikolayevich Kholopov, a reputable Moscow Conservatory, professor, used to call Losev a musicologist, which sounded expressly polemical, and considered his theory, the best in the twentieth century. The issue of versatility of musicological methods, classified as theoretical, and historical ones, also including hermeneutics, semiotics and philosophy of music, is raised at the very, beginning of the book., The three words that open the book’s title—music, eidos and time—are sort of load-bearing, constructions which are the most important for Losev’s philosophy. Eidos is the pre-existing ideal image of, an artwork, which continues existing together with it. Time is the condition of evocating the eidos, which, allows the musical artwork to exist in reality. Music, existing only through time, has the capacity to stop it., 1 The work was performed with the support of Russia’s Foundation for Humanitarian Studies: Project No. 14-03-00376. Author