Review: The research subject is the work of a modern composer from Astrakhan Yu.P. Popov; the research object is the music culture of the 20th century. The author studies the scope of the composer’s works containing his metaphysical ideas commonly found in the Russian philosophical doctrine - unitotality, communal spirit, and the idea of Sophia. Analysing the composer’s works, the author manages to describe his views on the world order. The author uses the following methods: analytical (when analysing the form, music style and language), philosophical-hermeneutical (when analysing the content of the pieces of music). The author detects the key constants of the metaphysical strivings of the composer. Special attention is given to the composer’s reference to the program character which includes not only the title of a piece of music and its parts, but also text epigraphs and the method of instrumental intoning of a text. The most significant author’s contribution is the use of the philosophical-hermeneutical method for the analysis of the content of the pieces of music. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that this music material hasn’t been studied before.

Keywords: Russian philosophy, musical language, Logo, unity, Sofia, collegiality, metaphysics, music by Gontsov, music, content analysis

Review: The research object is “A German Requiem” by J. Brahms, which is a unique meta-text concentrating various semantic structures, both music and ideological. They serve as cultural codes containing a wide cultural and historic context: it was formed by the system of patterns of the German national culture - the Protestant religion, philosophy, history, literature, etc. The research subject is a group of internal semantic motives underlying “A German Requiem”. As the key approach, the author has chosen the context approach revealing the cultural and historic conditions the German romantic composers used to work in. Textological and music analysis of “A German Requiem” helped the author to describe the internal process of genre bifurcation between the traditional Catholic canon and Brahms’ individual project in the spirit of the German liberal Protestantism. The study of “A German Requiem” helped characterize it as a genre simulacrum preserving only formal resemblance with a traditional funeral mass. The internal composition of the music piece is unique; it is defined by the logic of the composer’s idea influenced by personal and national semantic motives. In total, the example of Martin Luther’s theory, considered by the majority of the Germans as a national hero; the cultural heritage, penetrated with the melodics of Protestant chorals; the works of outstanding baroque composers headed by J.S. Bach - all of it had formed a specific set of values, the semantic constants of of which were implemented in the works of many German philosophers of the 19th century, including romantic composers. The romantic individualism of Brahms had formed in the same conjunction with the German national music culture.

Keywords: musical semiotics, choral processing, German music, cultural pattern, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther, German romanticism, protestant choral, Johannes Brahms, Deutsche Requiem

Review: The research subject is the phenomena and processes related to the beginning of the Vienna operetta genre as a phenomenon of the emerging mass culture.
On the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries, Vienna, the capital of Austria, was the largest music center, where a range of music and theatre genres, anticipating the emergence of new music phenomena, became widely spread - aristocratic Italian opera, French operetta, Austrian-German busk comedy and singspiel. The specificity of the socio-political conditions in the country (the Age of Metternich) facilitated the utmost development of the art of entertainment, in music - vocal lyrics and dance (waltz), in theatre - comic genres. The author uses the comparative historical method, the historical-typological approach, general scientific methods of analysis, generalization and classification. The novelty of the approach consists in the fact that Vienna operetta is considered as one of the initial stages of mass culture formation.
The model of French operetta showed Vienna composers and playwriters the example able to combine the advantages of “high” and “low” genres, foreign influence and domestic traditions. As a result, Vienna operetta (F. von Suppé) was formed as a variant of a young genre possessing the features of a fundamentally new mass culture.

Keywords: Popular culture, Waltz, Farce, Singspiel, comic opera, French operetta, Vienna operetta, Italian opera, musical theatre, von Suppé

Review: “Sequenzas” is a unique cycle that is a landmark not only for the work of Luciano Berio, since it combines the brightest elements of innovatory understanding of the author’s music performance, but also for the global musical art, since, together with his “Sinfonia” (1968), it has become the symbol of the Postmodernist esthetics. The research subject is the most popular among composers the thirst three Sequenzas, which are among the most significant ones in the composer’s body of work. The openness of the form and content, the use of arts synthesis within one instrumental piece, penetration of a word into the instrumental form (verbal reference to the genre of instrumental composition), poly-stylistics, decorating one piece of music with the variety of a language palette, the diversity of not only the performer’s interpretations of each composition, but also of a listener’s comprehension, the use of new principles of notation connected with aleatory music - all these signs of Postmodernism are represented in “Sequenzas” fully enough, and are demonstrated in this article in the analysis of particular compositions of the cycle, and the most representative of them are the first three ones. This article analyzes these works of the composer.
 

Keywords: stage dramaturgy, fine art, the content of art, musical art, theory of music, philosophy of music, musicology, art history, 20th century music, spatial music

Review: The article studies the life and creative work of an Italian Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo Di Venosa serving as an opera plot. The article considers two opposing views on one of the most mysterious stories - jealousy murder of his wife and her lover committed by the composer. The author considers the issue of the composer’s legacy in new music and the reference to this issue as a cited material. The reason why the composer’s legacy is so significant for the music reflections of the 20th - the 21st centuries is particularly interesting. The author gives numerous examples of Carlo Gesualdo’s music interpretations in the late 20th - the early 21st centuries. The author studies various composers’ positions on the life and creative work of Carlo Gesualdo. The basis of Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera plot is the story expressed by non-verbal  instrumental and sound means by the witnesses to the crime - nocturnal nature, birds and insects.  Luca Francesconi defines his position in a different way. He doesn’t consider Carlo Gesualdo as a murderer, and the morder doesn’t take place. The author arrives at interesting conclusions about the revaluation of music legacy by these two composers: Sciarrino avoids citing choosing an elegy of Claude Le Jeune woven through the opera, while Francesconi electronically dissects the fragments of popular Carlo Gesualdo’s music.  

Keywords: post-serialism, new music, Luca Francesconi, modern opera, Gesualdo considered as a murderer, Salvatore Sciarrino, opera, Carlo Gesualdo Di Venosa, quotation, modern opera house

Review: The article touches upon some biography facts and creative concept aspects of a Chinese born American composer Lei Liang and characterizes the essence of a range of composition techniques used by him. The purpose of the research is to attract attention to the works of the composer not widely known in Russia.
Lie Liang’s life history can be divided into two stages - the Chinese one and the American one. The creative and scientific milieu the composer lived in in China significantly influenced his creative formation. Having acquired music education in the USA, Lie Liang was oriented towards search for new sound ideas, studying the phenomenon of sound, which resulted in the series of sonorist compositions (including the piano cycle Gardens, the compositions “Against Piano” for a piano and two performers, “Lakescape” for two flutes, etc.). The main research methods include the method of historical reconstruction, analysis and comparative analysis. The research methodology is based on the works of Russian, European, and Chinese researchers - M. Vysotskaya, G. Grigorieva, L. Gakkel, C. Kohoutek, Bān Lì Xiá. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the fact that the authors introduce the scope of pieces of music by Lei Liang into the Russian musicology, study his esthetic views which defined the direction of his composing pursuits. The creative worldview of the composer was influenced, on the one hand, by the musical tradition of Asian cultures and Oriental philosophical concepts, on the other hand, - by the principles of thinking of American avant-garde composers of the late 20th century.

Keywords: religious and philosophical ideas, the concept of creative, biography, Chinese music, American composers, piano music, Liang Lei, avant-garde technology, Sonorism, musical composition

Review: The research subject is dance performance and the peculiarities of its artistic communication. Performance means that performers have no roles, they represent themselves; for dance performance, their gestures and movements have no underlying messages. The performative esthetics means that there exists a transformative range of spectators’ comprehension. The Performative Turn is described by the theatre critic E. Fischer-Lichter as manifestation of an unusual in a recognizable. The study aims to detect performative characteristics, the dichotomy of the real and the imaginative in dance performances of Moscow dance artists. The author focuses on the solo “Tants-Tants-Trants” by A. Andrianov and the “Red Square” by T. Burnashev as the examples of dance performance in which dancers represent themselves. The method of phenomenological reduction helps reveal the potential for spectators’ experience of the reality transformation in the works by Andrey Andrianov and Taras Burmashev (created together with  E. Kalyuzhnaya, D.Volkov, M. Orlova). Artistic communication in dance performance hasn’t been studied sufficiently enough. The author’s conclusions can be used for the formation of criteria in critical analysis of dance performances.

Keywords: Taras Burnashev, Andrey Andrianov, contemporary dance, self-reference, performative aesthetic, artistic commincation, dance performance, Dmitry Volkov, Marina Orlova, Ekaterina Kaluzhnaya

Review: The research subject is the creative work of one of the most mysterious composers of the 19th century Charles-Valentin Alkan. The authors give some facts of the composer’s biography to answer the question about his disappearance from the scene of Romantic music despite the continuing work of the great genies of Romanticism: Chopin, Liszt, Rubinstein, etc. The authors study the example of the set of “12 études dans tous les tons majeurs” Op. 39 to demonstrate the unique style of Alkan crystallized in collaboration with the composers of the previous epochs and his contemporaries. Due to the lack of the Russian studies of the issue, the authors analyze the works of foreign authors to evaluate the artistic legacy of Alkan. The authors attempt to break the Alkan semantic code using the example of the piece 12 Op. 39  Le festin d'Ésope (Aesop's Feast), which the outstanding performers have been trying to crack for more than 50 years, positioning the meaning of their interpretations. The article contains the authors’ conclusions about the urgent necessity to study the work of Alkan in within the Russian musicology.
 

Keywords: the genre of the etude, romanticism, semantic code, co-création, Le Festin D'Ésope, Charles-Valentin Alkan, style, interpretation, figurative sphere, piano technicism

Review: The third stream and the progressive jazz have a special place in the modern orchestral jazz. The article considers the album “Real Enemies” by an American musician James Argue. His are in the top of ideas of the contemporary experimental jazz. One of the peculiarities of Argue’s work, which makes it stand out from similar works of the earlier period, is the closeness of this composer’s ideas to Postmodernist practices. The authors consider some Postmodernist aspects typical for the contemporary jazz. Argue himself is considered as a jazz artist inclined to excessive intellectual component, who prioritizes orchestrations, relatively complex by jazz standards, and exquisite work consisting in jazz stylistics rethinking via mixing the instruments of jazz expression with various techniques of academic music of the 20th century. The authors give special attention to a detailed musicological analysis of the key compositions of the Secret Society’s Real Enemies.
 

Keywords: aleatorics, improvisation, musical postmodernism, orchestral jazz, progressive, the third movement, modern music, jazz, synthesis in music, creativity