Concept of the “Open Form” by Nadezhda Goryukhina in the Paradigm of Modern Musicology

Abstract

The article discusses the research work of Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Goryukhina by revealing the issues of open form in music. The author emphasizes their fundamental importance in the system of modern musicology. Two detailed essays by N. Goryukhina “Dynamic forms” and “Open forms” have constituted that “basic” corpus of knowledge about open form, laying the foundations for its understanding as a phenomenon were associated not only and not so much with aleatorics, but covering a whole layer of musical works in different styles and genres, created in different historical periods of the evolution of musical art, are oriented to the violation of existing artistic and structural laws.The scientific novelty of the article consists of: 1) analytical understanding of the main provisions of N. Goryukhina’s scientific theory on the open form in music; 2) revealing the interrelationship of N. Goryukhina’s research with the scientific developments of the past (works by B. Asafiev, V. Bobrovsky, I. Barsovaya) and the present (K. Zenkin, E. Ruchevskaya and other musicologists) of time.The main goal of the article is to identify the most important theoretical foundations in the understanding of the open form by N. Goryukhina, which formed the necessary “foundation” for its subsequent study and the methodological “platform” of the modern teaching on the open form in musical art.In the methodology of the article, methods of historical and theoretical musicology interact flexibly. The analysis of the historical “path” of N. Goryukhina’s scientific developments in the modern theory of open form suggests using of historical musicology as fundamental methods — narrative, retrospective, and partially comparative. The analysis of the immanent musical and non-musical sides of the open form in the works of N. Goryukhina and other musicologists is carried out in reliance on the methods of theoretical musicology, among which the main place is occupied by the method of functional and holistic analysis.The scientific results of the article will enrich the modern theory of open form with a number of valuable observations of the author regarding the informative and structural-compositional uniqueness of the open form in music, emphasizing the perspective and direction in the “future” of musical science of the basic concepts of open theory N. Goryukhina.