Semantic aspects of musical language

Abstract

Music is a multifaceted phenomenon: it carries the mission of aesthetic education and enlightenment, performs therapeutic functions and is not only a source of information, but also the subject of filling human consciousness with a sense of joy, drama, and a high spiritual beginning. All the above is provided due to the many components that constitute the whole picture of musical art. These include intonation and rhythm, tempo and dynamics, timbre and texture, and more voluminous components: genre and form. Each of its elements represents a certain category, which, in turn, carries a semantic load or semantic aspect belonging to it. Having a centuries-old history of existence, music and, accordingly, its components have undergone considerable evolution. The purpose of the study is to show the semantic aspects of musical language as an integral system in their continuous dynamics of development, updating, and complication of content. The history of sound creativity is a vivid picture of styles and techniques of writing, images, and themes inherent in a particular era. The above is inextricably linked with the deep evolution of semantic aspects that convey the content and importance of all the leading categories of music. They represent, regardless of the period, an integral system of elements, the transformation of which is discussed in this article. The definition of the boundaries of "evolution" in relation to music, the disclosure of its action at various levels (the evolution of musical thinking, the evolution of national style, artistic area, the evolution of individual compositional style), the development of the theory of evolution in the field of functioning of musical phenomena – these and other problems are priorities for modern scientific musicology and art criticism. Realising the complexity and globality of the problem posed, the basis of which is the consideration of musical phenomena in the aspect of the theory of evolution, this article includes one of the possible approaches to solving this issue, involving the "general theory of systems" created in the 20th century. For that reason, this publication is relevant. It combines the most important theses of researchers investigating the problem of the semantics of the musical language in the context of such disciplines as pedagogy, quantum physics, medicine, social science. The study searches for the materials on the studied subject, their systematisation, and provides a panoramic display of the analysis of the semantic aspects of musical art. The author also shares the prospects of analysis of the mentioned phenomenon. The need for this research is conditioned by the essence of the subject, since it constantly changes, gets enriched with new qualities, actively responding to what is happening in real-time.