The dissertation is devoted to the special analysis of Ukrainian music science as a holistic phenomenon. On the basis of the accumulated over a century of diverse achievements of scientists we investigate a system of their most important thematic interests. Consequently, the Content reflects the consistent formation of the fundamental branches of the theoretical studies represented by the interests: the artifical and non-artifical music. Each of them are devoted to the scientific elaboration of the problems related to the elements of musical tissue and the phenomena associated with them, the peculiarities of their creation and perception, which form the quintessence of the given branch. An important feature of the study is the emphasis on the theoretically significant individual achievements, backed up by sources and facts, since it is this that defines the main content of any science, but in music today they lose their role.
The subject concentration of the dissertation focuses on scientifically well-grounded author's ideas, concepts that have made a certain breakthrough in their areas, causing the branch to progress, or have created the precon-ditions for further discoveries. They are consistently interpreted from the point of view of essence in terms of the essence and features of historical existence. Due to this analysis, the canon of the Ukrainian musical-theoretical expression, which has the characteristic national features, is marked by the specification of the intellectual thinking of our scientists, the manifestation of their archetypes of the consciousness of the nation. In it, the process of inheritance of ideas is albeit linear, but not equally saturated.
The research also demonstrates that Ukrainian musicology is very dyna-mic, because in it at each historical stage were present different directions of thinking, problematic and thematic interests, though more often several si-multaneously. At the same time, it is a widespread and complex orga¬nism with a single "cross-flow" of elementary interests since its inception. Keeping it, researchers rarely limited themselves to one subject of interest, most often involving in the orbit of their reflection the related components of music, phenomena, interpreting them from various posible angles (mostly aesthetic, psychological or sociological, and in relation to folklore or ancient layers of church music also linguistic, in addition, textual, palaeographic, and others). Applying the complex approach or studying several problems at once, and often even those and even directions, Ukrainian scientists, especially in their classical works, formed their own original systems of conceptual ideas. Later, in the period of the USSR, they were often restricted by the "small" (though important) topics in which the imposed descriptive-critical-appraisal approach greatly hindered the use of theoretical developments. Nevertheless, there ap¬peared a lot of "small" theories, individual weighty analytical observations, often of a conceptual nature that greatly enhanced the understanding of the subject of the study or contributed to its rethinking.
Certain detachment of Ukrainian researchers from the manifestations of ideological struggle spoiled them with a western type of scientist, with the way of thinking independent of external socio-political factors, doomed to rely only on the truth obtained through in-depth searches and tested by time and practice.
The study deals with the complexity of the periodization of Ukrainian musicology (the history of theory), since, as proved, the main value of the history of science are invariants comprehension of the truth, which has the ability to be preserved, reconstructed. Thus, the peculiarities of thinking, em¬bodied in the choice of themes, problems, application of specific methods, the development of certain ideas, fixed in the period of the formation of an independent branch, which were clearly identified at the initial stage of the development of musicology, developed at its later stages, sometimes uninten¬tionally, often geographically remotely. Therefore, the above mentioned divi¬sion into three stages of the branch development is symbolic.
