Guiding Hand

The emergence of imaginative children’s music in the second half of the nineteenth century reframed the relationship between children and music in revolutionary ways. The dominant paradigm had been for children to repetitiously practice mechanistic exercises, a time-consuming occupation that the German composer Robert Schumann considered particularly wasteful and tasteless. In response he composed Album für die Jugend in 1848, a collection of children’s pieces that utilised a combination of text, picture and music to appeal to the interests of children, and to inspire their enthusiasm for musical play. Schumann envisioned his music as an extension of familial nurturance, which played a powerful role in directing children towards a musically and spiritually rich adulthood. As the tradition of imaginative children’s music developed during the nineteenth century, the dual themes of entertainment and education remained central to its generic identity, and continued to speak to the significance of piano music as a tool for the socialisation of children. The work of Jacqueline Rose offers a lens through which to explore this music’s manipulative influence upon children. The multimodal and performative characteristics of these musical pieces demonstrate the hidden influence of the adult’s guiding hand and the dire consequences that come to those who transgress musical and social boundaries.

Paul Hindemith’s Cantata “Frau Musica” in the Context of the Participatory Musical Art Development

The article analyses the cantata “Frau Musica” by the German composer P. Hindemith. This work has come to be widely understood as an example of Gebrauchsmusik in the works of O. Leontieva, K.-D. Krabiel, M. Breivik. Gebrauchsmusik is often identified as utility music, which means that it is created for some specific purpose; but the purpose does not have to be utilitarian. In order to assess the profoundness of the composer’s concept and to clarify specifics of the descriptive term, it is necessary to go back to the basics of the theoretical debates about the social role of art that unfolded in the 1920s. Their main participants were H. Besseler and T. Adorno. A valuable source of information is the programs of music festivals in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden, where Gebrauchsmusik was evolving as a multi-genre artistic experiment. Hindemith played the leading role in this process. It is also important to understand the reasons that prompted the composer to use M. Luther’s text in the cantata “Frau Musica”.Today the Gebrauchsmusik’s ideas — revitalization of the audience, expanding access to musical education and practical musical activities that evolve collaborative work — have gained the most relevance. According to the author’s hypothesis, “Frau Musica” can be regarded as an illustrative example of a work that combines different views on the nature of musical participation: a spiritual act, a collective work, the highest level of musical accessibility. In this particular composition, Hindemith intuitively found the most promising ways for the development of creative interaction between the composer and the listener, which subsequently led to the creation of a whole corpus of participatory works, including Tod Makover’s “City Symphonies”, Alexander Radvilovich’s “Baltic Music”, Paul Rissman’s “Supersonic”.

Adyghe (Circassian) theme in the work of Western European composers of the 19th century

Целью является рассмотрение в контексте эстетики романтизма тип отражения образов Кавказа композиторами XIX века в Западной Европе без апелляции к «чужому слову» и использования этнических языковых элементов. Вводятся в научный обиход две фортепианные пьесы - «Черкесский марш» австрийского композитора Иоганна Штрауса (сына), «Черкесская песня» немецкого композитора Жана Вогта (Фогта) и пьеса Альфреда Лебо для фисгармонии (органа) «Черкесский марш». Использование контекстного подхода и музыковедческого инструментария анализа, позволяет выявить существенные черты музыкальной поэтики сочинений и прийти к выводу, что инонациональная образность передается западноевропейскими композиторами посредством условного обобщенно-поэтического воплощения темы Кавказа. Теоретическая значимость состоит в изучении творчества европейских композиторов, в том числе и «второго ряда», но весьма значимых для выявления отношения к адыгской (черкесской) теме в культуре Европы XIX в. и понимания специфики отражения этой темы в творчестве композиторов иных музыкальных культур. Практическая значимость - в возможности дополнения содержания дисциплин национально-регионального компонента образовательных программ вузов культуры и искусства. The goal is to consider, in the context of the romanticism aesthetics, the type of reflection of the images of the Caucasus by composers of the 19th century in Western Europe without an appeal to the "alien word" and the use of ethnic language elements. Two piano pieces "Circassian March" by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss (son), "Circassian Song" by the German composer Jean Vogt and the play by Alfred Lebeau for harmonium (organ) "Circassian March" are introduced into scientific use. The use of a context approach and musicological tools of analysis allows us to identify significant features of musical poetics of compositions. The author concludes that Western European composers convey foreign imagery through a conditional generalized poetic embodiment of the Caucasus theme. Theoretical significance lies in the study of the work of European composers, including the "second row", but very significant in identifying the attitude to the Adyghe (Circassian) topic in the culture of Europe of the 19th century and understanding the specifics of reflecting this topic in the work of composers of other musical cultures. Practical significance - in the possibility of supplementing the content of disciplines of the national-regional component of educational programs of universities of culture and art.

J. S. Bach’s Church Cantatas and Church Music Today

How do we as Christians today learn about worship and church music? How do we think about not only what music we will sing in Christian worship, but also the principles that should guide us in choosing and leading church music? Certainly, there are many different ways we answer that question: we study the Bible, we sing the words of the Scriptures, we read what theologians, worship leaders, and scholars of church music are writing today, we attend lectures and conferences by scholars and practitioners of church music. In this article, I offer and explore yet another example of how we live out God’s call in leading music for the Christian church: by studying the example of a faithful Christian musician from the past. My particular example for this article is the German composer and church musician Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). I want to clarify from the start that I am not arguing that J. S. Bach is the best example of a Christian church musician and certainly not that he is the only example. But Bach does offer us one example of a musician who dedicated most of his life to creating and leading music for the Christian church and sought to do so faithfully, creatively, and skillfully.

ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE CAST OF LENINGRAD OPERA AND BALLET THEATER NAMED AFTER S.M. KIROV IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1941

The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that 80 years ago – on June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people began. In the second half of 1941, millions of Soviet people unexpectedly became defenders of the Fatherland: commanders and political workers of the Red Army, ordinary Red Army soldiers and Red Navy men, partisans and members of the underground, some of them were captured and turned into prisoners of nazi concentration camps. The author focuses on the most interesting episodes from the creative and social life of the world-famous Leningrad State AcademicOpera and Ballet Theater named after S.M. Kirov (GATOB) and its artists. How did they meet the beginning of the war? What happened in the theater in the pre-war months of 1941, as well as in the first hours and days of the war? What was the theater’s repertoire in 1941? In his work, the author primarily uses the materials of a number of issues of the theater newspaper «For the Soviet Art», published in January – September 1941 in Leningrad and stored in our time in the funds of St. Petersburg State Theater Library, for the first time introducing them into scientific circulation. He tells about the details of the theater’s creative activity, which today are of undoubted interest to all amateurs of the Russian culture. It is concluded that the outbreak of the war made significant adjustments to the repertoire of the on-stage performance group, radically changed the entire life of Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater. It is particularly emphasized that the last pre-war opera premiere of the great theater on the stage in Leningrad was the performance to the music of the German composer R. Wagner «Lohengrin». In those years, Wagner was considered in Germany one of the symbols of the «Aryan culture» of the Third Reich. Today, the author believes, it can be supposed that staging of the German «Lohengrin» in Soviet Leningrad in June 1941 had a political nature, and the decision to work on the performance was made at the highest state level.

Bach, Bukowski, genesis

The object of this research is the references to the German composer of the XVIII century – Johann Sebastian Bach in poetry of the classic of modern American literature Charles Bukowski. Special attention is given to the poetic-semiotic and ontological aspects of Bach’s motif in the poetic works of C. Bukowski. The author meticulously examines the nature of mentioned references, categorizing them as the three narrative-ontological types or hypostases, in which the German composer appears in the poetry of C. Bukowski, namely: Bach-ideal, Bach-background, and Bach-father figure. The article employs the method of continuous sampling, interpretation and semantic analysis, motivic analysis, as well as biographical and psychological approaches. The author's special contribution into the research of this topic lies in the conclusion on the Bach’s motif in the poetry of C. Bukowski as a variety of ekphrasis, which suggests a verbal representation not of a single artwork, but of the demiurge (in this case it is Bach) as the creator of entirety of his brilliant compositions.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s music at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn: actualization of the classical heritage in conteporary art projects

Problem statement. Contemporary art space creates special conditions for the functioning of the classical musical heritage. The principle of the classics, which results in the formation of certain ideas about the criteria of the “reference” work and the ways of interaction with it undergoes a radical transformation. The turn of the XX and XXI centuries became a time of experiments, including experimental dialogues of the contemporary artists with the classical artistic artifacts. The relevance of the study is due to the growing scientific interest in the specifics of the implementation of contemporary art projects. The scientific novelty of the article is connected with the attempt to analytically comprehend the process of actualization of classical musical works in the conditions of the modern artistic environment. Theoretical Background. In the context of our study, the views of P. Sloterdijk (1986) on the autonomy impossibility of the classical text and the study of U. Eco (1986), focused on the dynamism of the artistic universe of the postmodern era and the multiplicity of its possible interpretations, are recognized as the most essential. Objectives. The purpose of this study is to reveal the specifics of the actualization of classical heritage in contemporary art projects (based on “Quando ci risvegliamo” by S. Sciarrino, presented at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, 2015). Results and Discussion. The specifics of creative rethinking of L. van Beethoven’s works, done by contemporary European composers (S. Sciarrino, H. Dufourt, V. Tarnopolsky, B. Lang, E. Poppe) during the European cycle of the Beethoven Festival (2015–2019) are analyzed. The content of the multi-layered work “Quando ci risvegliamo” by S. Sciarrino’s is revealed as it is caused by the allusions to Fantasia for piano, soloists, choir and orchestra Op. 80 by L. van Beethoven and the symbolic drama “Når vi døde vågner” (“When We Dead Awaken”) by H. Ibsen. The interaction between the texts takes place on a structural, symbolic and semantic levels. The space of silence on the imaginary border of sleep and awakening, modeled by S. Sciarrino in “Quando ci risvegliamo”, builds cross-cultural connotations, appealing at the same time to the work of the German composer and the Norwegian playwright. Conclusions. The conclusion on the actualization of the classical text in the conditions of the modern art environment at the expense of employment of other classical texts is made. It is noted that the appropriate level of cultural training and experience in perception of artistic texts, expected from the hypothetical recipients, should allow them to perceive the cultural and artistic connotations of the new work, which are included in the hypertext of postmodernism.

“The fest of the forward culture”. Ludwig van Beethoven’s anniversary in the “Land of Soviets”

The problem field of the study. The celebration of the anniversary of a historical personality gives a meaningful assessment of this person in a particular period from the point of dominant ideological paradigm, indicates his place in a particular socio-cultural space and his significance in the artistic context. This is proved by the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of L. van Beethoven in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the seventies of the 20th century, at the turn of the decade, the reputation of the classical composer as a “sacred figure of spiritual culture” became a factor that escalated the social conflict of generations in his homeland, a vivid manifestation of which were the fateful events of 1968. As a result, the reputation of the “The Great Deaf”, which had been built up over centuries, underwent a radical revision, as indicated by the general “critical pathos” of the anniversary celebration. The celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of L. Van Beethoven in the Soviet Union turned out to be completely different in terms of socio-political and artistic directions. Thus, the purpose of the study is to identify the mechanisms of ideological inversion in relation to the great German composer and his work, as well as the peculiarities of the organization of the country’s cultural and artistic life in connection with the anniversary. These issues are still of current interest because: – firstly, referring to the events that happened fifty years ago, we can note the transformation in the perception of the composer’s personality in the socio-cultural space; – secondly, it becomes possible to objectively, without ideological inversion, evaluate the artistic life of the USSR in general and Ukraine in particular (then the UkSSR); – thirdly, the analysis of the jubilee events of that time clearly highlights the fundamental tendencies of modern policy pursued by our state in the field of culture. Results for discussion. The Soviet Union formed an institutionalized image of L. van Beethoven, which was widely replicated by all possible scientific and artistic means in the culture of the 70s of the 20th century. As a result, the image of a mythologized character with a set of fundamentally mandatory, immutable, easily recognizable features that successfully distinguish him from other representatives of the artistic pantheon, was firmly implanted in the minds of the so-called “ordinary citizens” of the USSR: genius, “The Great Deaf” and favorite composer of Lenin. Thus, throughout practically the entire historical period of the USSR, according to the musical preferences of the “leader of the world proletariat”, the personality of L. van Beethoven and his work underwent an ideological inversion, the starting point of which was 1927 – the centenary of the death of the German composer. At that time, the priority goal was to demonstrate that “own” is different from “bourgeois” by marking the centenary of the death of the great German composer. The fact is that this oppositional paradigm of the 1920s formed a universal algorithm of “jubilee celebrations”, according to which a proper program of events (officially, ideologically and artistically approved) was designed and implemented throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Thus, the 200th anniversary of L. van Beethoven in the Soviet Union at that time acquired all the hallmarks of a national holiday, manifested in governmental celebrations with mass media propaganda and appropriate repertoire in all cultural and artistic institutions in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and other cities of the country. A specially created commission headed by D. Shostakovich – the Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the Lenin Prize – supervised all the work on organizing the celebrations. On his behalf, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “Pravda” on December 16 published a programmatic article “Bequeathed to the Ages” on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of L. van Beethoven. The text was a concentration of propaganda clichés that fully reproduced the ideologically inverted image of the “The Great Deaf”. Thus, the celebration was carried out in the confronting opposition to bourgeois ideology, reflected in the socio-political discourse. Conclusions. As a result, the personality of L. van Beethoven underwent those transformational processes of ideological mythologization. This is evidenced by all the propaganda rhetoric associated with the anniversary celebrations, as well as the content of artistic life in the USSR, which was provided with the necessary budgetary funds. The state cultural policy of that time, focused on the broad (popular) masses, by its nature contradicts today’s trends in meeting the individual spiritual needs of a a personality.

Interpretation Content of the Modern Musical Theater: Portrait in the Style of ad Libitum

Relevance of the study. The interpretive space of modern musical theater is one of the most dynamic, multivariate and modernized world culture phenomena. In the era of culture “non-classical paradigm” the past cult operas viability is maintained through their renewed representation and “alienation”. The refusal to perceive the author’s work as complete and the only possible for realization emancipates the modern interpretive strategy and opens up endless possibilities until the emergence of the “corporate” opera text’s phenomenon. So the interpretation process extends to the work’s “inner sanctum” — to its music and thus allows the involvement of the modern artist’s personality to co-author with the composer of the past. The unique example is the opera project “Boris” by corporate authorship of Modest Mussorgsky and contemporary Russian-German composer Sergei Nevsky (2020, Staatsoper). The need for update the ideas about the modern musical theater’s interpretive strategy and the lack of this project research provides the relevance and the innovative essence of the material.Main objective of the study is to determine the modern interpretive strategies of modern opera theater on the example of the project “Boris”.Methodology. The material specificity led to the adaptation of the fellowing research methods: the interpretive — to identify the modern musical theater main interpretive strategies in relation to the production of “Boris Godunov” by M. Mussorgsky with an emphasis on the project “Boris”; the hermeneutic-semantic — for the purpose of reveal the intonation-image specificity of the analyzed S. Nevsky’s project; the comparative — for juxtaposition of two co-operas authored by Mussorgsky and Nevsky as components of the project “Boris”; the holistic intonation analysis — to study the intonation and drama specifics of the hybrid work.Results and conclusions. The modernity interpretive reality initiates the emergence of radically new trends in the opera interpretation. An example of the modern musical theater innovative strategy is the hybrid project “Boris” synthesized from two stylistically contrasting operas that belong to different epochs: “Boris Godunov” by M. Mussorgsky and “Second-hand Time” by S. Nevsky. The research considered the intonation-genre specificity and its indicators from the point of view of the associative musical text theory. The associative text of “Boris” exists in two versions: as a quotation (in S. Nevsky’s opera “Second-hand Time” was adapted the material from “Boris Godunov” by M. Mussorgsky); b) in the form of a whole work presented by Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” in the framework of the entire project “Boris” which is a unique opera phenomenon.