The dissertation focused on study of a traditional vocal culture and regional stylistics of the north-eastern segment (NES) of Ukraine - the zone of ethnic (Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian) and ethnographic (Polissia-Dnieper-Slobidschyna) borderlands in terms of melogeography. The melogeographic issues become especially relevant when studying the traditional culture of border areas, since the natural progress of their historical development is complicated by numerous spatial factors of the relationships of different cultural environments. The existing in such a coordinate system often becomes an additional destructive factor for a particular local tradition : interaction, intermingling of neighboring stylistic systems leads to leveling, erasure of characteristic local-dialectal features, decline and extinction of some "exotic" phenomena, giving way to more common and popular ones. On the other hand, the contacts of different traditions are followed by peculiar stylistic diffusions, which can contribute to the formation of new cultural phenomena, to the creation of a new style quality. Both the processes themselves and their results are valuable for scientific understanding. Therefore, the interaction of traditions in the areas of cultural borderlands is of special interest for meloareological studies, raising a number of questions about the genesis of certain phenomena, their development in terms of interregional and interethnic contacts.
The wedding ritual songs are chosen as the research material. Like the ritual tunes of the agricultural cycle, they are among the oldest and most conservative in the folk tradition, have a high degree of typification, therefore, they are the most significant for reproducing the picture of the development of a certain regional tradition. Wedding songs, in contrast to the calendar ones, still functioned until recently in a folklore environment. This led to their better preservation, typological diversity, melodic development, richness of melo-rhythmic variability. That is why the system of wedding ritual tunes is considered the most productive material for meloareological studies, in particular for the research of border areas.
The purpose of this work is to determine the specifics of wedding songs of the north-eastern sector of Ukraine by melotypological and meloareological parameters, to outline the dialectal-stylistic zones within the selected region, to identify the nature of their geographical (areal) contacts, to form an overall picture of the ethno-musical landscape of the NES. The analytical base of the research is formed on the basis of archival and published audio materials, own field records of the author, sheet music sources. The electronic catalog of regional ritual songs contains more than 7000 samples, about 5000 of which are wedding ones). The melodies are analyzed according to morphological and phonological criteria, the obtained data are systematized, mapped. As a result of work, the functioning of about two dozen typical wedding structures in their rhythm-compositional and melodic varieties was identified in the studied areas, their modifications were described, areas were determined, the most important stylistic tendencies and vectors of their distribution were traced. Performing-stylistic methods of cadences in ritual melodies ("hukannia") are classified and mapped for the first time. Maps of distribution of wedding melotypes and some stylistic elements, more than a hundred musical transcriptions of wedding songs from the studied region are brought into scientific circulation.
Within the researched territories, 9 dialect-style zones were identified and described, the nature of their areal contacts was traced, the coherence of the identified traditional musical areals with the data of linguistics, history, ethnography was highlighted. The existence of the most important stylistic opposition between the traditions of Polissia (north) and Dnieper region (south), devided approximately by the Seim river, along which a strip of transitional dialect-style areals appears, is substantiated and analytically proved. The outlined main lines of the regional-stylistic division of the studied array of the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian borderlands form the basis for the future systemic historical-ethnographic zoning of the specified geographical space.
