The study of the singing voice is the “point of countdown” for scientific knowledge of vocal art, both in the historical plane and in modern artistic representations. The type of singing voice is an objective source of value-semantic characteristics of music that personify the human world, both in the system of national tradition and in the composer’s style. The phenomenon of the soprano at the modern level of its cognition by historians and practitioners of art requires a certain rethinking. It turned out that its history and status in modern performance were not so obvious, even for specialists. The semantics and the timbre personification of soprano, the genre-semantic range of the soprano, their demand for composers have not yet been fully covered, taking into account the wealth of national-stylistic contexts of the art of singing. Based on the study of musicological works by Chinese (Yin Pin, Wu Jing, Zhang Ke, Cui Baoya), Ukrainian (O. Stakhevych, V. Gigolaeva, O. Markova, O. Shulyar) and European (W.E. Brown, S. Cotton, L. Manén, E. Giudici, F. Thomas, P. Tosi) scholars, a balance is sought between European experience and the preservation of national traditions of vocal art (in particular, Chinese and Ukrainian). In the dissertation the identified problem circle “composer – singer – vocal language – timbre personification of the soprano” is highlighted: 1) on the basis of a historical and cultural comparison of Chinese (“native”) and European (“foreign”) traditions, which are actively studied, assimilated and integrated into the creative work of modern Chinese performers; 2) on the material of Ukrainian chamber and vocal music, which focuses on the singer's mission to represent the lyrical essence of the music as an author's reflection or concert representation of female images. Another circle of problem is the linguistic and stylistic specificity of the chamber-vocal genre as a separate "niche" of vocal performance.
The topicality of the topic is confirmed by such factors as: • lack of works on the problems of soprano timbre personification in the light of the musical symbolism of vocal music of the 20th century, which has not yet been the subject of thorough development in Chinese musicology; • installation on the conscious deepening of the genre-style paradigm of the concert-chamber repertoire of vocalists, which is a general trend of higher musical education. Thus, the relevance of the topic of the proposed dissertation lies in the absence of a systematic study in musicology that would generalize the specifics of the art of the soprano as a performing phenomenon of new European music, determine its historical role and mission in the present. The second factor in the relevance of the topic is the understanding of the urgent need for Chinese performers to clarify the cognitive mechanisms of European vocal music of the 20th century in the process of its reproduction in concert practice and scientific discourse. The object of research is vocal art in the unity of compositional and performing practice. The phenomenon of the art of the soprano is the subject of research, which is considered in the context of national and linguistic and stylistic priorities of its development. The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of the art of soprano through a comparison of the linguistic-stylistic and national priorities of the development of this performing phenomenon in the culture of the past and present.
Scientific novelty of the obtained results. For the first time in musicology: – the mission of the art of soprano as a performing phenomenon is highlighted, which through timbre-image personifies the female hypostasis of the world and generalizes the artistic visions of women into a crosscutting archetype of world culture; – the comparison of the art of soprano in the context of the national traditions of Europe and China is carried out, which outlined the historical and cultural landscapes of their development, which allows us to rely on mental mechanisms in the process of singers' assimilation of a "foreign" culture; – the path to the interpretation of foreign-language vocal compositions is substantiated through the method of deciphering musical and poetic symbolism, which expresses the cognitive component of performing creativity; – the semantics of the timbre personification of the timbre-role of the soprano in the context of the national-stylistic representation of the Ukrainian and Chinese worldview are revealed; – the features of vocal lyrics in the compositions of the symbolist direction are revealed through gender characteristics; – the archetypes of female images in chamber-vocal genres of Ukrainian and Chinese music are generalized.
