The thesis considers a multifaceted and multilevel phenomenon – musical portraiture, which foundations and leading trends were established in the XVII century and sustained to this day. Musical portrait study lies in the intersection of many scientific disciplines – philosophy, creative work psychology, aesthetics, culturology, art history, hermeneutic analysis, theories of styles, intertextuality, cultural memory, etc.
The study summarises numerous developments in some aspects of the studied phenomena complex, generalises, systematises and classifies them on the examples of piano and pianoforte works of artists of different national composer schools and epochs, genres and styles. The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to find the most essential features and components of the creative arsenal that ensure the uniqueness of the “person” reproduced in the musical portrait genre through a set of stylistically and semantically expressive features against individual or historical style background, their classification as the universal features system of the artistic mannerism that create the effect of image recognisability in a particular context.
We analysed only those works in which a specific image was recorded. Given the huge number of such opuses, the context is chamber piano and pianoforte works respectively of XVI-XVII and late XIX - early XX centuries. Taking into account “portraiture’s” peculiarities and regularities, specific and typological features at a certain historical stage, the reduction of pianoforte literature was aimed at distinguishing musical pieces from different, including stylistic, layers. These are XVI-XVIII centuries virginalists’ and harpsichordists’ works as the earliest examples of appeal to the “musical portrait” (J. Bull, F. Couperin, G. T. Muffat), and works of representatives of several stylistic trends and national schools of the late XIX – early XX century (S. Rachmaninoff, E. Villa-Lobos, J. Dundlo and A. Casella). The dissertation deepens the complex theoretical basis as a methodological foundation for the study of musical portraiture; analyses differences of individual style and semantic field of the composer image in a musical portrait within the European instrumental tradition frame; systematises methods of personalised semantics forming in contrast to the symbolic system of the composer image marking in a musical portrait; studies the citation and self-citation motivation; reveals the culturological context and certain historical and stylistic traditions influence on the means of different types of portraiture. The paper also specifies musicological concepts that are appropriate for differentiating musical portraits patterns and methods of semantic analysis textual study in relation to the subject of study.
The study confirmed that creating different types of musical self-portraits or reproducing the image of another artist have different motivations, tasks, goals, methods and communication types with the recipient.
Illustrative examples of the creative heritage of those composers who have demonstrated a consistent desire to mark their own presence in their opuses (both in isolated cases and those who have identified it as a sign of individual style) or a tendency to attract a symbolic or semantic complex of features that determine associative series to the images of other artists were taken as the basis for arguing the provisions of the study. From these positions, the study analyses a significant body of various genres creative works by artists with excellent aesthetic and stylistic attitudes, which are represented by composer schools of several European countries.
The paper also projects further prospects for the analysed topic scientific development, both in the direction of musical material field expanding and in the direction of cultural analysis deepening.
