Between “Musical Form” and “Analysis of Musical Works”. Georgy Catoire’s Doctrine of Musical Form

The last, unfinished book of Georgy Catoire — “Musical Form” — was completed and published by his students. One of them, Lev Mazel, became the founder of the new course — “Analysis of Musical Works”, which replaced the former “Musical Form” in Soviet conservatories. However, to a certain extent, this course goes back to the ideas of Catoire, which received a peculiar refraction in the concept of Mazel. The Catoire, unlike his predecessors Marx and Riemann, wrote not a textbook of practical composition, but a theoretical study. “The Structure of Musical Works” by Mazel does not set a practical compositional exercises as well. The influence of the Catoire can be seen in Mazel’s book as the principle of forms systematics. Like Catoire, he puts the structural principle at the head, in which, however, the leading principle of the metric symmetry is understood not so consistently as in Catoire’s work. If the main task for Catoire is finding the laws of the structure of a musical composition, then for Mazel it is describing and listing the most frequently encountered properties of it.