String Quartet Research Articles

Reflection, Representation, Religion: André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus

André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus (1923), a song cycle scored for mezzo soprano soloist, women’s choir, string quartet, and two harps, has a lush sound world and dramatic vocal declamation, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by the Parisian musical press. The work’s religious topic—mysteries of the rosary—has long been taken as the unambiguous sign that the piece and its composer were unapologetically Catholic, like the author of the poems, the convert Henri Ghéon. In the context of a secular French nation, unambiguous Catholicism can easily signal reactionary politics. Moreover, since it does not project images of anarchy, flappers, or committed nonchalance toward morality, when interpreted vis-à-vis the narrative of French musical aesthetics in the 1920s, the work’s status changed from masterpiece to footnote. Yet, though the work’s early reception by Catholic writers cemented its classification as a sacred work, Caplet’s own goals were less clear. Through a comparative musical analysis of characteristics that Le Miroir shares with Caplet’s secular works whose themes come from classicism or mystery, I demonstrate his agnostic aesthetic. Through an investigation of archival sources relating to Caplet’s smaller contemporaneous projects, including a 1923 setting of a poem by Baudelaire, his contribution to La Revue musicale’s 1924 Le Tombeau de Ronsard, and his response to a 1924 survey about “new music,” Caplet’s interest in classicism emerges as a salient context for understanding his largest postwar composition. Additionally Caplet’s real-time documentation of his creative process and goals in detailed correspondence with his wife, Geneviève, contributes further evidence of Caplet’s pragmatism. Rather than moralistic and reactionary, Le Miroir can be understood in the context of postwar artists attempting to render spirituality less institutional and more personal.

Art Forms Emerging: An Approach to Evaluative Diversity in Art

ABSTRACTArtworks are rationally evaluable and comparable within their art form, but not from outside. Beethoven's string quartets cannot be evaluated against works of Hindustani music. This is the problem of evaluative diversity: local commensurability, global indeterminacy. This article sketches an approach to the problem based on novel conceptions of aesthetic pleasure and cultural learning, and on the Darwinian Principle of Divergence as applied to cultural evolution.

Multi-Strand Musical Narratives

Multiplot forms as described by Garrett (1980) provide a promising route of approach for analysts addressing complex musical works. Although originally developed from a study of Victorian fiction, these forms can also illuminate music, particularly when paired with Booker's (2006) list of seven basic plot types. In this article, I present a model analysis of multiplot musical narrative through an analysis of the finale of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A-flat major, op. 110, as well as two other Beethoven works: the “Cavatina” from the String Quartet in B-flat major, op. 130, and the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony.

Academic music transcript modeling using electronic sound synthesis

Nowadays, computer technologies are integrated into all art forms. New artistic directions emerge which are totally based on multimedia (primarily audio-visual) instruments. The question about the role of music art in the new cultural paradigm becomes topical. Based on the example of academic music, the article considers the possibilities of using programming tools for music scores processing into a transcript. The authors consider the possible mathematical model of a piece of music which allows processing the piece of music and getting both an authentic and an experimental version. The authors analyze the set of parameters helping to form a virtual acoustic space corresponding with an artistic concept. The authors demonstrate that academic music transcript modeling using electronic sound synthesis can promote the artistic reinterpretation of the score of the piece of music. The selection of particular timber, performance and spatial parameters during transcribing helps to interpret a composition according to the artistic tasks. The use of virtual instruments also allows creating digital recordings without performing musicians. The article contains the variants of forming a virtual acoustic environment based on the example of a classical piece of music for string quartet: from a “traditional” to an “experimental, differing in musical sources positioning, a set of spatial effects and the parameters of their adjustment.   

Elphick , Daniel Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 368 Elphick, Daniel. Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries. Music in Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2020. 298 pp. Music examples. Tables. Figures. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £75.00. A restless, plaintive melody underscored BBC coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January 2020: the opening of the first movement of Mieczysław Weinberg’s String Quartet No. 5 (1945). The quartet was played as survivors and dignitaries assembled at Auschwitz for the 75th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation. To those familiar with Weinberg’s music, not least through the recent widening of interest in his work, the juxtaposition reinforced a number of associations: Weinberg (1919–96), composer, Jewish, close family murdered in the camps. As musicologist Daniel Elphick demonstrates in Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries, however, Weinberg’sJewishnessandtraumaticlossesarepartofamorecomplexidentity; so, for that matter, is another common Weinberg story (friend of Shostakovich, residentintheUSSRafterflightfromNazis,prolificbutmusicallyconservative). Elphick’s contribution to Weinberg studies distinguishes itself by exploring the composer’s continuing relationship to Poland and its musicians after his escape to Russia; it is a counterbalance, as such, to Verena Mogl’s 2017 examination of Weinberg’s Soviet contexts. Yet Elphick has no interest in reclaiming the composer for Poland. Instead, he draws attention to the ‘dialogue of loss and influence’ interconnecting ‘all three spheres of [Weinberg’s] identity’ (pp. 13, 14). Blending lucid music analysis with careful contextualization, the study is a quietly ambitious first monograph from a significant new voice in Polish and Russian music scholarship. The ambition resides in Elphick’s interweaving of three strands of argument and methodology across the book’s chronological survey of Weinberg’s life and work: twentieth-century Polish and Russian musical/political history, plus theoretically-engaged analyses of Weinberg’s seventeen string quartets (for Elphick, the composer’s laboratory). There are obvious drawbacks to this strategy in a relatively concise book: of necessity, some major works (most notably The Passenger, Weinberg’s Auschwitz opera) receive little attention; music analysts may sometimes find themselves wishing for longer or more detailed readings. Nevertheless, the juxtapositions are often sharply illuminating, and Elphick presents neat analyses, the best of which (on quartets no. 5, 6, 8 and 12) persuade the reader of his assertion that some of Weinberg’s finest music for the medium surpasses the quality of contemporary quartets by Shostakovich (p. 97). These and other aspects of the book make it a self-recommending addition to any serious collection on Polish or Russian music. I appreciated, for instance, REVIEWS 369 the way Elphick places Jewish experience more centrally in his telling of Polish music history, supplementing existing studies; his paralleling of Weinberg’s transplanted fate with other Polish exiles, such as Andrzej Panufnik, who fled the height of Stalinism for the UK; the contrast of captive Russian and liberated Polish musical minds after Stalin; his analytical focus on music by less celebrated Poles (most notably Grażyna Bacewicz, her String Quartets Nos 3 and 7 receiving strong attention here); the details added to our knowledge of musical relations between the USSR and Poland after Stalin; and the ironies of offerings like a post-1968 Soviet rewriting of Polish music history ‘absolving Soviet figures of any wrongdoing by omission’ while celebrating ‘“a colossal wave of joyful art, bursting with energy and merriment”’ (Polish socrealizm, apparently). Occasionally, the diversity of methods in play threatens to overwhelm the music or composer, as in the critical collective (Lacan, Eliot, Dante, Adorno, Hepokoski) brought to bear on Weinberg’s eleventh quartet in chapter four (an ultimately productive approach that would have benefited from more space in which to unpack ideas). But Elphick marshals his forces well, for the most part, and works hard to avoid excluding readers (not least students) with less expertise. The book makes a particularly substantial contribution to the study of Weinberg’s musical language, presenting lexicons of terminology that detail different sides of a coin: the revelation of Weinberg’s subjectivity through his style and its symbolic effects. As a ‘reactive’ (J. P. E. Harper-Scott) or ‘mainstream’ (Arnold Whittall) modernist, Weinberg’s music ‘incorporates [unresolving] dissonance’ but also...

Dmitry Shostakovich by Fairclough Pauline (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 366 istinnaia pravda. The word dolzhen can also be problematic. I sometimes felt (e.g., on p. 213) that it would have been better to translate it as ‘should’ or ‘ought to’, rather than ‘must’. For those who will not have the time to read the whole text, I should mention that the Subject Index is particularly well done. Some readers will find it comforting and reassuring that the author concludes Part 3 with the assertion that ‘[o]ne cannot transcend Westernism, since Westernism itself means the continuity of self-transcendence’ (p. 173). University of Glasgow Martin Dewhirst Fairclough, Pauline. Dmitry Shostakovich. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2019. 191 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. £11.99 (paperback). This is a sensible and insightful book. Much of Shostakovich’s reception has been distracted by political agendas wielded both for and against the man and his works, and interpretation of the music has often been a fraught affair played for high stakes. Pauline Fairclough deals with these ‘Shostakovich Wars’ (p. 9) calmly and judiciously, without attempting to resolve ‘his divided existence’ (p. 177) in favour of either his public or private side. She also, to the relief to the general reader doggedly interested in the composer and his music, deals with them quickly, passing over the musicological intricacies of, for example, the Volkov case in order to open up spaces in which the music can be heard for what it was, is, and might be worth. There is much to be gained from this slim volume, and hardly any theoretical weight to slow down the general reader (the occasional mention of ostranenie (p. 152) and other culturally appropriate terms). Aside from the programme notes on individual works, which consist of the sorts of explications that the general reader might desire (the string quartets are treated to some wonderful interpretative prose), the book also includes genuinely new archival material, in the form of a complete letter written by the composer in 1949 about a potential trip to New York (pp. 96–97). Shostakovich’s film music is given space alongside his concert music, all the better for the book’s portrait of the composer as a Soviet artist. There is ample attention devoted to Shostakovich’s personal life, and especially his important friendship with Sollertinskii, not as a vulgar interpretative cipher, but simply as another register in which our understanding of the composer needs to dwell. There is also a fair amount of discussion, mostly at the ends of the book, but also scattered throughout, of what we might make of the composer’s music in our currently political, financial and cultural contexts; one question concerns the music’s understandable popularity and whether that itself poses an obstacle REVIEWS 367 to our fuller understanding. Fairclough’s own desire is ‘to challenge the idea, still commonly held, that Shostakovich’s music is depressing, and that he himself was a broken man at the end of his life’ (p. 11). In this respect, Dmitry Shostakovich is a success, for by the end the general reader emerges with a clear picture about the composer’s status within Soviet society in the 1960s and early 1970s: for example, his marriage in 1962, his slow rise within the Communist Party, the studied ambiguity — ‘so oblique as to be invisible’ (p. 136) — of his public position under Brezhnev, the profoundly brave decision to set certain texts, the diagnosis of lung cancer in 1972 (p. 156), and so on. In the final couple of chapters, some of the works are interpreted in terms of a return home full circle (p. 168), a kind of symbolic closure that perhaps seduces biographers more than listeners. There are some interesting and tantalizing references over the course of the booktowritersandcomposerswithoutwhomShostakovichwouldhavebecome a wholly different artist. Of the musicians, one encounters time and again the interventions that Mahler made in his life (e.g. pp. 30, 54, 170). With additional space, it would have been useful to dwell on this epic figure, considering the ways in which Shostakovich’s heteroglossia (including allusions both to specific music and to generic gestures and archetypes) is found ‘not just in an opera’s message...

Из истории струнного квартета. Феликс Мендельсон и Фанни Хензель в диалоге с Бетховеном

Статья посвящена непосредственным композиторским откликам на поздние квартеты Бетховена. Наряду с более известными, но недостаточно освещенными в отечественной литературе струнными квартетами Феликса Мендельсона-Бартольди рассматривается также Квартет Es-dur его сестры Фанни Хензель (1805-1847), талантливого композитора и музыкального деятеля, чье творчество - несмотря на имеющийся опыт музыкально-исторического и аналитического его рассмотрения - еще не вошло в общие представления о развитии музыки в XIX веке. Между тем этот квартет вписывает интересную страницу в историю жанра; он заслуживает внимания как музыковедов, так и исполнителей и слушателей. The article is devoted to some direct composers’ responses to Beethoven’s late string quartets. Along with better known but not well-studied in the Russian musicological tradition string quartets by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, it is about the Quartet in E-flat Major by Fanny Hensel (1805–1847), Felix’s sister, a talented composer and musician, whose work— despite the abundance of music historical and analytical essays—has not yet entered into general ideas about the development of music in the 19th century. Meanwhile, this quartet inscribes an interesting page in the history of the genre; it deserves the attention of musicologists as well as performers and listeners.

The power of allusion: Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and Op. 130 VI*

Beethoven composed two strikingly different finales for his string quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130. The original Grosse Fugue finale is an immense and heavy multi-sectioned movement, while the second so-called “little” finale is a lighter sonata-rondo hybrid. The extensive body of scholarship surrounding when and why Beethoven composed both movements almost always promotes the polarity of the two endings. However, I argue that these two movements are more closely related than previously recognized. Specifically, I uncover multiple allusions, or similarities between these finales in terms of melodic and rhythmic contour, texture, and form, that exist in the final versions and which can also be traced back to Beethoven’s sketch material for the second finale. The power of allusion allows us to bridge the gap between these finales and helps to promote the second finale as both a ‘late’ and non-conventional work alongside the original.

Piano concertos by F. Chopin: “composing center” means

Piano concertos by F. Chopin: “composing center” means

Three musical love letters

Music, Shakespeare suggested, can be the “food of love”. For a composer, however, it can be the vehicle for so much more. This article discusses, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how three pieces of music variously convey a declaration of triumphant adoration (Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll); an exploration of the pain of betrayal and reconciliation (Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht); and a confession of the joy and sorrow of unrequited love (Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No 2, Intimate Letters). The role of muse for a composer and the power of music for the listener as aspects of projective identification are also considered.

Architecture and language in the seven String Quartets by Iulia Cibişescu-Duran

Abstract Written between 1990 and 2009, my seven works for string quartet: Poems for string Quartet and 6 numbered Quartets approach different modal languages, from prepentatonic or pentatonic structures to heptachordic or dodecaphonic configurations, sometimes overlapping musical languages, generating those polymorphous languages, with moments of overlapping or juxtaposing of syntaxes, with a motivic cycling determinant of a conceptual unit of works linked to synthetic, elaborate thinking. Pluripartite, seen as suites of miniatures (String Quartet No. 3, Poems for string quartet), tripartite (Quartets No. 2, 4, 5, 6) or monopartite (Quartet No. 1), the 7 String Quartets are written in the sphere of formal patterns caused by construction based on dramaturgy inspired by literary works (see Quartet No. 5 inspired by Winter at Lisbon by Antonio Munoz Molina, see Poems for string quartet and Quartet no. 3 inspired by my own poems from the volumes Hiding places of Masks and Egyptian Mystery), from the contemplation of the chordal sonorities of some tonal-functional relations or of some jazz sonorities (Quartet No. 4), of a Byzantine song or children’s songs (Quartet No. 3), of philosophical meditations (see Quartet No. 1), of sonorities belonging to the Romanian song and dance (Quartet No. 6) or of some concision and refinement as reflections of Webern’s music, overlaying on small temporal spaces different musical languages belonging to different tuning systems (Poems for string quartet). The first audition of String quartets was at the International Festivals of the Musical Autumn of Cluj and Cluj Modern Festival (1990, 1993, 1999, 2001, 2003, performers: Concordia Quartet: Albert Markos, Grigore Botar, Olimpiu Moldovan, Adalbert Torok), as well as at the International Meridian Festival, Bucharest (2018, Quartet No. 6 played by the Ad Hoc Quartet: Vlad Răceu, Diana Man, Ovidiu Costea, Vlad Rațiu, musical management: Matei Pop).

“Octatonic” Voice Leading and Diatonic Function in theAllegro moltofrom Elgar’s String Quartet in E minor, op. 83

In this article, I focus on a short, two-bar passage from the end of the development section of the finale of Edward Elgar’s String Quartet op. 83, which explores smooth voice-leading relationships between octatonic polar seventh chords. I look to ascertain whether this short passage can be heard to form part of a larger, coherent tonal gesture or if it effects a change of syntax that swaps the movement’s predominantly diatonic frame of reference for an octatonic one and thus establishes a moment of disjuncture within the form. My answer to this question is informed by analysis both of the passage in question and of earlier (albeit less piquant and transparent) instances of octatonic voice leading in the exposition.

Tanatología Mística: S. Mallarmé, H. Michaux, G. Scelsi

The fifth and last string quartet of the great composer, musician and poet Giacinto Scelsi, written in 1984 in memory of his friend Henri Michaux who has just died, which is his last work, stripped, austere, is based on a Fa that fades between a white noise, and that reappears at the end in a vibrato that is the composer’s last breath. His music, Michaux will say, «is magnetized by the ineffable». This quartet constitutes an austere and naked funerary wake, with an overwhelming effect, a testament of Scelsi himself. The composer and poet die two years later than Michaux, taking with him all the secrets of his creation. Song of the swan that precedes the final silence of death, symbolized by the two empty, white pages that close their poems. These white pages constitute in Mallarmé a self-referential Nothing: «Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend». The viaggio al centro del suono to which Scelsi aspired leads the musician poet to the death of the verbal images and the return to silence of the white surface of the page: «suddenly the white surface», he writes in one of his poems. Annihilatio mystica in the form of a blank page that in the three authors –Mallarmé, Michaux, Scelsi– leads to a wisdom of emptiness.

THE MAIN TENDENCIES AND STAGES OF THE QUARTET GENRE FORMATION IN UKRAINE


 
 
 This article is devoted to the historiography of the Ukrainian string quartet. The article presents a detailed description of three musical and artistic ideas of the quartet genre – “timbre and coloristic, “virtuoso technical” and “semantic”. The author presents the examples of implementing these three musical and artistic ideas in the works of composers of different eras and national school. It is emphasized that the nature of the string quartet is revealed at the intersection of global categories of genre and style in music, which are adapted through corresponding traditions of art. These categories can be divided into historical, inherent in different schools, as well as “personal”, individual. The author of the article identifies three main stages of the quartet genre formation in Ukraine: “neoclassical”, “neo-folklore” and “polystylistic” and characterizes their main tendencies. The time frames of these three stages are outlined comparing to the development stages of the quartet genre in Europe. The article contains the examples of reproducing the basic tendencies of the quartet writing style as well as the technical means of performing practice, which appeared to be dominant in this or that period of time. The most striking examples of quartet pieces from the point of view of genre, epoch and national stylistics are analyzed.
 
 

Enhancement of Conventional Beat Tracking System Using Teager–Kaiser Energy Operator

Beat detection systems are widely used in the music information retrieval (MIR) research field for the computation of tempo and beat time positions in audio signals. One of the most important parts of these systems is usually onset detection. There is an understandable tendency to employ the most accurate onset detector. However, there are options to increase the global tempo (GT) accuracy and also the detection accuracy of beat positions at the expense of less accurate onset detection. The aim of this study is to introduce an enhancement of a conventional beat detector. The enhancement is based on the Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO), which pre-processes the input audio signal before the spectral flux calculation. The proposed approach is first evaluated in terms of the ability to estimate the GT and beat positions accuracy of given audio tracks compared to the same conventional system without the proposed enhancement. The accuracy of the GT and average beat differences (ABD) estimation is tested on the manually labelled reference database. Finally, this system is used for analysis of a string quartet music database. Results suggest that the presence of the TKEO lowers onset detection accuracy but also increases the GT and ABD estimation. The average deviation from the reference GT in the reference database is 9.99 BPM (11.28%), which improves the conventional methodology, where the average deviation is 18.19 BPM (17.74%). This study has a pilot character and provides some suggestions for improving the beat tracking system for music analysis.

Daniel Weymouth's in (all) the time we have left

Daniel Weymouth's in (all) the time we have left Sunny Knable (bio) What shall we do with the time we have leftShall we talk of countries and kingsshall we see the small thingsthis, then this, then thisunfolding. A bove are the words written after the final bars of Daniel Weymouth's 2008 quintet for clarinet and string quartet, in (all) the time we have left [referred to as in (all) the time hereafter], which read like a psalm for the 21st Century. This inscription, written by the composer, silently marks the end of an homage to Weymouth's colleague at Stony Brook University, John Lessard, a composer who passed away in 2003. Weymouth's quintet explicitly quotes Lessard's Quintet for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Violoncello and Piano (1993) and borrows key elements from it throughout his own composition. The efficacy of Weymouth's elegiac work lies in the kindred relationship between the two pieces, as this paper will demonstrate through an analysis pertaining to form, texture, register, pitch, rhythm and other particular characteristics of in (all) the time.1 [End Page 129] By his own admission, Weymouth often begins his compositional process by creating a map of salient pitches, and in the case of in (all) the time, had done precompositional work mapping out his intended timbres and textures as well. Charting the formal sections is as simple as taking note of those elements, in addition to double bar lines, which the composer uses to mark the change of character. Searching for these demarcations yields the form shown in Example 1. While Weymouth is traditional in his willingness to use clear-cut sections and repeated material, he avoids any resemblance to classical forms by utilizing a linear progression of ABCDE. An intriguing aspect of in (all) the time is that it is accompanied with a "bonus track" as Weymouth whimsically calls it: a miniature piano solo entitled A Trifle, for Jack (referred to as A Trifle), which is both a complement to his quintet and a condensation of it. Its existence constitutes a useful tool when beginning an analysis of the larger composition. Comparing the material in Weymouth's A Trifle to his quintet was like searching for gold with a treasure-map. Many elements of pitch-class are plainly apparent, others are hidden, and some are seemingly nonexistent. In the twelve-measure piece, there is a Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. delineations of form in weymouth's in (all) the time [End Page 130] correspondence to nearly every section of its larger counterpart (see Example 2). A straightforward link between the two can be seen in comparing the opening phrases. The first four notes of A Trifle are found in all voices of the strings in m. 2 of the quintet (Example 3). Other associations are more elusive such as in mm. 104–06 of in (all) the time, corresponding to m. 6 of A Trifle. Though the pitches are rearranged and interjected with other pitches, the range and recurrence of material makes the connection evident (Example 4). Whereas most of the pitches in A Trifle can be accounted for, between mm. 8–9 of A Trifle, about 100 measures in the quintet are not reflected in the miniature. This could be attributed to the fact that the C section functions like a distillation from non-coordinated textures in the A/B sections to the coordinated gestures in the D/E sections, as explored later in this paper's analysis of rhythm. Click for larger view View full resolution Example 2. comparing weymouth's a trifle to in (all) the time [End Page 131] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 3. notes of m. 1 of a trifle found in m. 2 in (all) the time [End Page 132] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 4. notes of m. 6 of a trifle found in m. 105 of in (all) the time [End Page 133] Another characteristic marking the form is the use of tempi. An odd element among these is the difference in his metronome markings, strangely close in number. As seen in Example 5...

Шедевр на заказ. Поздние струнные квартеты Бетховена

Making music to order is a common practice for many composers. At the same time, as one explores specific music pieces a question inevitable begs itself: how writing music to order affects the creative process and the final result. How do such things as the personality of a customer and the relevance of the order to personal aspirations of the composer contribute to the emergence of a musical masterpiece? In this regard, special mention should be given to Ludwig van Beethoven’s last string quartets (Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 “Big Fugue”, 135). These pieces have already received a considerable degree of attention in the research literature. Nevertheless, questions remain about the reasons for this or that turn in the sequence of events and the development of Beethoven’s creativity that impacted the originality of his later works. It is known that the quartets emerged due to an external impulse – an order of the Russian philanthropist, cellist, and a music critic N. B. Golitsyn. Beethoven’s extensive correspondence with Golitsyn, publishing houses, musicians, and friends recreates the sequence of events and the main milestones in the composition of quartets – from the conception to the publication of musical opuses. Of particular interest is the unusual story behind Op. 130. Its grandiose scale, complexity and unusual content created a lot of controversy in assessments and judgments among Beethoven's contemporaries. As a result, at the insistence of the publisher М. Artaria, the finale was replaced, and this piece received an independent existence and a special name – Grand Fugue for String Quartet” (Op. 133). This masterpiece has not lost its relevance even today: it still sparks interest and debate about ideological and figurative content of Quartet Op. 133.

«Сумної дримби звуки» Є. Станковичав аспекті втілення неофольклористичних тенденцій

Research objective is to study in more detail the manifestations of neo-folkloristic direction in the chamber art of Yevgen Stankovich, to reveal the characteristic features of this phenomenon on the example of his play “Symnoi drimbi zvyki”. The methodology of the research is to use stylistic, analytical, generalizing methods that allow to investigate the specifics of involvement and rethinking by the author of folklore material. Scientific novelty. The play “Symnoi drimbi zvyki” in E. Stankovich’s chamber art is an example of the original interaction of neofolklore traits with modern composer techniques – all of which in the complex embodies the peculiarities of the individual style of the composer, revealing the timbre and sound coloration of his important factor. The leading idea for the work is the idea of ethnophony, which manifests itself as a timbre-sound aspect of folk instruments. The ethnophonism of the play recovers the forgotten sounds of the slumber, the tune of the nozzles, the vocal tones of the trembits by the use of purely academic instruments; reproduces the peculiarities of the system and techniques of playing these folk instruments. Conclusions. In E. Stankovich’s work, chamber and instrumental music becomes one of the most favorable areas for the search for neo-folk direction. For the composer, neo-folk tendencies remain an important factor in updating the artistic content and musical language of his works. Bright examples of this are such chamber works by E. Stankovych as the triptych “On the Verkhovyna” for violin and piano, string quartet, “Ukrainian poem” for violin and piano, “Symnoi drimbi zvyki” for cello and piano. In the last of the listed works, the neo-folklore aspect becomes an important stylistic feature of the composer’s creative work, which combines traditional and innovative, folk intonations and melodies with dissonant harmonies, sonoristic means. The mutual influences of folk and professional art become extremely important elements both for the author’s style of E. Stankovych and in general for the modern Ukrainian school of composition.

Matchsticks, Harmonic Space, and Transpositional Networks in the First Movement of György Kurtág's String Quartet Op. 1

Matchsticks, Harmonic Space, and Transpositional Networks in the First Movement of György Kurtág's String Quartet Op. 1

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Chamber Music Works in the Context of the Transformations of the Composer’s Style: Selected Examples

The aim of this paper is to analyse stylistic changes in Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s output on the example of four selected chamber music works: Quartettino, Op. 5, Concerto for Five Instruments and String Quartet, Op. 11, Little Music 4, Op. 28 and Aria (‘operatic scene’), Op. 59. By applying the methods of structural and auditory analysis as well as style criticism, I discuss the diversity of composition techniques found in these compositions. Additionally, my methodology has allowed me to represent the idiomatic, idiosyncratic features of Górecki’s style and study the ways in which Górecki approached chamber music.