Znamenny Chant as a Constant of the Artistic World of Yuri Butsko: Chamber Music

Abstract

The article is devoted to the chamber-instrumental works of one of the brightest representatives of the Russian school of composition of the second half of the twentieth century, Yuri Butsko, in which his religious and musical philosophy is multidimensional and vividly embodied. The focus is made on the discovery of the author's approach to the "reintoning" of the cult chant in the fabric of secular composition and its role in the processes of meaning and text formation of the artistic whole. The works created by the composer mainly in the early period (1960 – 1970s) in chamber genres are considered as a kind of creative laboratory in which the principles of dialogical poetics of religious and secular principles are formed, manifesting itself both at the conceptual level and at the level of textual relations. As a result of the analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that the church monody in the works of Yuri Butsko manifests itself as a dynamic construct, the musical vocabulary and semantic field of which, on the one hand, are amenable to reinterpretation in the process of creating new artistic samples based on it, on the other – have a transformative force that has a significant impact on the content, compositional-dramaturgical, intonation-thematic structure of the work. Both at the conceptual level, realized in the process of interactions of such structures as the symbolic invariant formula of the plot of Golgotha, the external program, the "plot" of the quoted chant, and at the level of textual relations, a multilevel original system of conjugation of Old Russian chant and individual author's poetics is formed in the chamber opuses of Yuri Butsko, which has no analogues in Russian music culture.