Mosienko D.M. Music for the dramatic theater and the formation of a school of composition in Kazakhstan

Abstract: This article attempts to identify some of the key features of the development of music for the dramatic theater in Kazakhstan and its role in the development of the national school of composition over the period 1920–1990. The theater was one of the centers of national musical culture not only for Kazakhs, but also for Uighurs, Koreans and other nationality groups. Despite this diversity of ethnic-national traditions, in the Kazakh dramatic theater there was clearly a desire for cultural community and mutual understanding among different peoples. The historical interaction of drama and musical theater in Kazakhstan, in the author’s view, played a decisive role in the country in opening a fairly large number of musical and musical drama theaters (16 of the 53 currently existing professional theaters).The article’s methodological basis is an integral approach to the musical and archival documentary sources on the basis of the principle of historicism, which involves a comprehensive review of the subject under examination.The author draws the following conclusions: the emergence of a school of composition in Kazakhstan was closely associated with the dramatic theater, which became a kind of "cradle" for the formation of European genres in Kazakh musical art. The interaction of drama and musical theater that had developed at an early stage in Kazakhstan (the 1930s–1940s) became typical of the subsequent years as well. Many composers continued to write music for plays, and then proceeded to compose operas based on these works. But there were also other examples in which operas were preceded by music for plays.

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