Review: The purpose of the article is to consider the opera by A. N. Kholminov "Anna Snegina", applying the concept of "topos". In the center of the plot is the image of the poet Yesenin. To comprehend historical events through the iconic image of the epoch became for the composer a direct expression of the author's ideas. Borrowed from literary criticism, the category of "topos" allowed us to reveal the stylistic features of Kholminov's operatic language. The perspective of the proposed research will make an additional contribution to the list of works on the study of Russian opera, which determines the relevance of this article. A detailed study of the concept of "topos" in the humanities opens up great prospects for its application in relation to musical works. Scientific novelty is connected with the problem under study. Insufficient research on this issue prompts a thesis to turn to the term in its primary meaning and determines the relevance of its functioning in musicology. For the first time, A. N. Kholminov's opera is analyzed by means of such a concept as "topos". In this article, an attempt is made to apply the concept of "topos" to study the complex of musical and expressive means. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that the principles of fundamental importance in the analysis of the text in literary studies take place in the study of the artistic world of the opera "Anna Snegina" by A. N. Kholminov.

Keywords: Yesenin, Anna Snegina, opera, topos of love, topos of melancholy, musicology, topos of the Motherland, composer, Kholminov, image

Review: The object of research in the article is the cult music of Simeon ten Holt Canto ostinato (1976-79), which is considered using the optics of metamodernism. The authors of the concept of metamodernism were the Dutch Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Acker, who created the manifesto of metamodernism (2010), another manifesto was subsequently created by the Briton Luke Turner (2011). This music, as well as the whole concept of metamodernism in music, represents one of the concepts of culture-after-postmodernism and proclaims the return of affect, semantic oscillation as a constant oscillation between direct utterance and irony, a new actualization of the meta-narratives devalued by postmodernism, which replaced postmodern total irony with post-irony. The novelty of the stated perspective is that for the first time in Simeon ten Holt's opus "Canto ostinato" such tendencies of musical metamodernism as new simplicity, the return of melody and tonality, the actualization of song and dance, the flickering affect of melancholy and euphoria, the purpose for the listener of a new type and the features of "sentimental minimalism" are revealed. Despite the fact that this music was created long before the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which became the cause of metamodernism, one can see such obvious features of metamodernism in it that one would like to see in this opus a manifesto of the musical metamodern looking into the future.

Keywords: Canto ostinato, metamodernism, new music, sentimental minimalism, ten Holt, affect, new tonality, return of melody, melancholy, post-irony

Review: 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.

Keywords: author's style, quotation, interaction, composition, secular, Russian music culture, religious, ancient Russian chant, chamber music, Yuri Butsko

Review: In the twentieth century, playing two pianos has become one of the leading forms of joint ensemble performance – many duet compositions have appeared all over the world, and the creation of works for such a composition is a separate branch of compositional creativity. The authors, representatives of different artistic trends, preaching various techniques and manners of writing, paid close attention to the piano duet. A special branch of the development of the genre at this time is represented by compositions in which quaternary is used as a unique, original method of creating compositions, suggesting special searches in the field of musical acoustics and aesthetics. They – the opuses of I. Vyshnegradsky, C. Ives, M. Cooper, S. Reich, V. Ekimovsky – for the first time in musicology became the main object of contextual analysis. The importance of such music for the heyday of the piano duet in the twentieth century can hardly be overestimated: it was she who brought into the genre a completely unknown acoustic imbalance of instruments, a dialogue of two personalized parts. The piano duet of the twentieth century is determined not only by its own artistic values expressed by specific duet works, but also by the significant contribution of the genre in question to the overall development of musical art – both composing and performing practice.

Keywords: modern composition, 20th century music, microtonal music, piano duet, the content of art, musical art, theory of music, philosophy of music, musicology, art history

Review: One of the vectors of active search for genre solutions in the domestic musical and theatrical art of recent decades is associated with the mono-opera genre. It is characterized by extreme diversity and participates in the active processes of transformation of the opera, the pull for renewal and adaptation to the social, cultural and spiritual needs of society. The concert mono-opera «The Death of a Poet» by Sergei Slonimsky for voice and piano, considered in this article, is an example that largely preserves the traditions of monologue forms of utterance in the opera genre. Slonimsky’s opus reveals the theme of the Poet, the unrecognized prophet, which is relevant for contemporary authors. The appeal to M. Lermontov’s poem of the same name, ambiguous in terms of genre and semantic content, which combined elegy and satire, determined the specifics of the formation of the mono-opera, its stylistic diversity associated with the comparison of two main figurative spheres of the mono-opera – sphere Poet (Pushkin, Lermontov) and Socially (high society, Dantes). The mono-opera completely lacks stage action and storyline, which brings it closer to the vocal poem genre; the literary basis is completely preserved, the declamatory type of intonation prevails. The theme of the «archetypal» conflict is presented by the composer within the framework of romantic aesthetics: the image of the rebellious Hero with his lyrical impulses is opposed to the alien world of the Anti-Hero. Surveillance of the mono-opera by S. Slonimsky «The Death of a Poet» allows us to conclude that it largely inherits the fundamental properties of the genre, which consist in focusing on the experiences of a creative person who is in conflict with others, however, it sharpens such properties of the newest mono-opera as a monologue confession of the hero in a critical life situation, maximum concentration on the image of the protagonist.

Keywords: Alexander Pushkin, The Death of a Poet, vocal poem, modern mono-opera, Mikhail Lermontov, opera, concert mono-opera, Sergei Slonimsky, mono-opera, XXI century