Витальность музыки: от истоков к реалиям нон-классики

Abstract

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of vitality in music. It is considered as a generic feature of music dating back to its origins and early forms. The historical evolution of musical vitality is briefly described, presented on individual examples, starting from the late Baroque, the works by I. Haydn, L. Beethoven, R. Wagner, A. Scriabin up to D. Shostakovich and the composers of the second half of the 20th — first third of the 21st centuries, to whom the main attention is paid. The purpose of the article is to identify specific, relatively stable forms of vitality’s manifestation which materialize both in individual elements of the musical language (such, for example, is the new monody that arose with the birth of opera at the beginning of the 17th century), and in integral phenomena of a systematic order. Among the stylistic events of the second kind, the article is specifically examined the concept of creation, the gesture of birth. Gradually, it crystallizes in music as thematic constant (based on biblical mythology, as in Haydn’s Creation of the World oratorio), but eventually emancipates from the plot basis, acquiring the universal significance. The result of the research is the identification of the mythological origins of the concept of creation; in some cases they come to the forefront (Introduction to the opera The Rhinegold by Wagner; Stimmung for six vocalists and electronics by K. Stockhausen). Another version of the concept of creation is formed in line with the romantic tradition. Then the birth of the world is associated with the lonely voice of the hero — the initial monologue of the solo instrument dramatically opposed to the orchestral mass (works of the concert genre by A. Schnittke, S. Gubaidulina, W. Lutosławski, B. Tishchenko, E. Denisov). In all such cases, the heightened sense of vitality is enhanced by special performing techniques. In the new music, the concept of creation is further developed and logically completed. The gesture of creation is no longer answered by the final statement of existence but by the gesture of destruction, annihilation of sound material — attenuation, acoustic extinction. The feeling of vitality in such compositions is specific, since musical material lives in them according to its own laws as if it doesn’t need a mirror of the subject (large orchestral compositions by Ch. Ives, Ya. Ksenakis, V. Tarnopolsky). The new music “brings to play” other non-classical aspects of vitality associated with threshold states on the verse of life and death. Starting with I. Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring the vitality of transgression becomes a noticeable phenomenon of contemporary music.