The paper deals with an aspect of the manifold philosophical works of the outstanding figure in the 19th-century Russian culture Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky (1804–1869). Being the aknowledged classic of the music criticism, one of the ideologists of the Moscow Conservatory, in his judgments about music Odoevsky proceeded from a philosophical setting of a special kind. Despite the different stands, which Odoevsky took in different periods of his work, the original idea of his «philosophy of music» remained the same. This is the setting on a holistic view: music may only be the subject of science if it is considered in the fullest possible context — historical, ethnographic, aesthetic, physicalist, etc. Odoevsky derived the intuition from the early German romantics and idealists from whom he also took the idea of «organic» development as opposed to the «mechanical». Odoevsky’s success as the music critic who discovered the music of Glinka and also as a pioneer in the study of Russian traditional music, both Church and folk, was made possible in no small measure due to his philosophical grounding, rare in Russia in that time. In later Odoevsky’s works the setting on a wholeness is a «regulative idea» but in the music pedagogy, particularly in «Besedy» (Conversations) in 1862 (the meetings attended by N. Rubinstein, the founder of the Moscow Conservatory), it is implemented as a methodological principle.
Abstract