The paper examines electronic music, its emergence and development in the cultural space of Ukraine. The peculiarities of the sound material, analytical methods, and the variety of existence forms of electronic music in the academic and non-academic environment against the background of globalization and peripheral processes in Ukrainian culture are presented. Based on the analysis of the "electronic music" concepts, the following definition is proposed: electronic music as a kind of art, which medium is mainly characteristic electronically synthesized or electronically prepared sounds.
The study of the electronic music classification principles allows to state its conditional division into academic and non-academic art according to the purpose - academic electronic music is designed for concentrated listening and motivated by experimental goals, while non-academic has utilitarian value and motivated by commercial goals.
Academic electronic music is generally classified according to its performance which allows distinguishing its following forms: «tape music», music for acoustic instrument(s) accompanied by tape and «live electronics» (music for acoustic instruments with real-time electronic audio processing).
At the same time, the classification of non-academic electronic music is not established. Dynamic development of non-academic electronic music, the variety of factors favouring its new forms emergence makes building its explicit classification system impossible. Different ways of its classifying by «genres» or «styles» used by commercial structures and in journalism differ from each other and characterized by confusion of «genre» and «style» terms. At this stage, it is proposed to use the term "trend" instead and to distinguish dance (techno, house, trance, drum'n'bass, etc.) and non-dance (ambient and its varieties, industrial, IDM, etc.) trends of electronic music.
In Ukraine, electronic music emergence was delayed relatively to Europe and the United States - the first composer's experiments in electronic music date back to the "thaw" of the 1960s, while the systemic development starts as late as in 1990s. The reason for this delay is socio-historical in its nature - the ideological guidelines of the Soviet era and the peripheral position of Ukrainian cities in relation to Moscow caused an unfavourable climate for artistic experiments.
Ukraine's independence has allowed Ukrainian composers to develop closer ties with foreign artists, to acquire Western European experience and technology, to organize concerts, workshops and electronic music festivals in Ukraine. In the academic environment, such activities include "Electroacoustics" (since 1997), "EM-VISIA" projects (since 2005), "Vox Electronia" festival (since 2013), in the non-academic - festivals "Republic of Kazantip" (1997–2013), "Ideology" (2003–2013), "Ultrasonic" (2011–2014), "Hamselyt" (2014–2019) and others.
In its early stages the electronic music in Ukraine developed under conditions of the predominance of peripheral phenomena. In the academic sphere, peripheral tendencies appear in the predominance of English-language titles of works and rear appeals to Ukrainian national motives by Ukrainian composers. In the non-academic sphere, in the 2000s, peripheral tendencies appear in electronic music festivals orientation to Western European and Russian traditions: the organizers rely on well-known Western artists and prefer Russian-language PR technologies. However, the emergence of more local-oriented festivals "Ultrasonic" and, especially, "Hamselyt" in 2014, indicate a certain shift to the regional centre emergence in Ukraine.
Since the end of the 1990s, new trends related to searching for combinations of electronic sounds with musical folklore sound universe arose in Ukraine. The aesthetic basis of these trends was the neo-folklore creative achievements of Ukrainian composers of the last third of the XX century. These searches, different by the implementation and the ratio of electronic and folklore components, in the 2010s, received a general name – folk electronics. Emergence and further development of folk-electronics marked the trend to overcome peripheral processes in Ukrainian culture and to involve Ukrainian national art into the world cultural space.
Key words: electronic music, electroacoustic music, Ukrainian culture, folk electronics, electronic dance music, electronic musical instruments, Ukrainian music.
