The thesis is dedicated to the interaction between a composer and urban space, since economical, social, and cultural structures of a city influence realization of the artist and his creative activity. At a micro-level this interaction is manifested in how through literary text one can find out about everyday practices, social communications network as well as peculiarities of space and sound context that surrounded an artist in a city; at a macro-level it represents urban space as a self-sufficient and complicated network of historical, symbolic meanings that define the auditory experience, since listening is not only a physiological act but also a cultural construct.
Research and analysis of sound practices in the city cultural landscape is a priority task within the framework of new interdisciplinary projects, such as urban musicology and sound studies. For a better understanding of these research optics, it was for the first time in the Ukrainian humanities that historiography was outlined along with the main circle of issues, sources, and methods that are used by urban musicologists and sound researchers.
Understanding of sound considerably deepens in the conteхt of consideration of sensory culture, so based on the analysis of different sources, common topics for this direction were distinguished: criticizing ocularocentricity of the Western culture; criticizing “hierarchization” of senses; criticizing of dualism theory of Rene Descartes. Several items were outlined which are points of approximation between musicology and sensory studies, namely: the performer’s body (how through the performer’s body music becomes audible), the listener’s body (how
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bodily experience affects music perception), the composer’s body (how the composer’s sensory modes materialize in music), the body of a musical text.
Possibilities of a multisensory approach in humanities were revealed. Coming out of this perspective, an artwork is interpreted as a matrix of sensory, bodily experience of its author. The expediency of such an idea is vividly illustrated in the context of a Georges Kastner’s theoretical work “Les voix de Paris” as well as creative biographies of Honore de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire.
Flânerie is a sensory and cultural exploration of a city during a walk, – not only was a popular everyday practice of 1840-50s, which directly reflected on the aforementioned Parisian artists' works but also is an indicator of fast changes of urban space. Considering the importance of flânerie in creating cultural space of Paris, a new notion for this phenomenon was suggested.
Noisy advertising of street vendors, acrobat performances, masquerade balls, concerts as well as popular operas, themes of which are sung by street musicians – all these components not only revealed the diversity of sound practices of Paris but also served as a field of active auditory experience of the artists. Composers (F. Chopin, F. Liszt, G. Verdi, R. Wagner, H. Berlioz, M. Glinka), who stayed in Paris or frequently visited it – formed sound markers of the Romanticism era and challenged conventional forms of music piece perception. Thus, the relevance of our research lies in revealing the peculiarities of the soundscape of Paris in the 1840-1850s and covering the role of the artistic contribution of M. Glinka into the diverse picture of urban auditory reality. To reach this goal, Parisian concert chronology was outlined, where M. Glinka’s pieces were performed as well as a network of cultural interactions of the composer with the performers, critics, publishers etc. It allowed covering wider the contextual substance of everyday communication practices.
Analysis of critical comments in music periodicals allowed to differentiate peculiarities of M. Glinka’s art reception in Paris, among them national specificity of his works in connection with the European traditions of the music culture.
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The suggested new way of reading M. Glinka's verbal texts from spatial optics. Extrapolating the mental mapping method to the composer biography allows deciphering the degree of approximation or alienation of his lifeworld concerning the locations, connected with music (or wider, cultural) city infrastructure; unlock the potential for an artist realization within urban context; model traces of social interactions between different participants of cultural communication, etc.
The composer’s spatial story tells us about his experience living in city, as well as emotions and metaphors which are incarnated in his art. That is why, immersion into space and sound reveals invisible presense lines “here and now”, when there is no chronologies and periodisations, but coexistense of feelings, ideas, and thoughts.
Keywords: city, metaphor, sensory culture, cultural practices, urban musicology, sound studies, soundscape, mental map.
