The dissertation is devoted to the substantiation of the narrative method of analyzing musical work and the parameters of narrativity based on the material of the Ukrainian vocal and instrumental ballad of the 20th century. The comprehension of the communicative nature of a musical work increasingly attracts the attention of researchers, which is stipulated by the expansion of the artistic consciousness of composers and the complication of subject-object relations of the author's expression. Narrative has been widely conceptualized in the humanities, especially in synthetic genres of literature, in which epic narrativity, dramatic conflict, and lyrical reflection interact. To study narrative in music, the Ukrainian ballad of the 20th century was chosen, as it demonstrates a unique synthesis of the national intonation tradition and European narrative models. Despite the existing studies of musical works in the ballad genre in domestic musicology, there is a lack of substantiation of its specifics in the aspect of narrative strategies. Thus, the relevance of the topic is stipulated by the lack of systematic studies of the Ukrainian instrumental and vocal ballad as a unique narrative genre, which will allow enriching the methodology of music analysis, taking into account the diversity of the individualstylistic embodiment of the narrative in composer's creativity. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the narrative method of analyzing musical dramaturgy on the example of the Ukrainian vocal and instrumental ballad of the 20th century. The object of the study is narrative as an interdisciplinary phenomenon of modern art studies; the subject is narrative in music as an archetypal phenomenon and a category of musicology. The material of the study includes the vocal ballads by Y. Meitus, H. Vereta, and instrumental ones by S. Bortkiewicz, A. Shtoharenko, M. Vilinsky, L. Revutsky, B. Lyatoshynsky. The research methodology is based on the application of general and special methods: systemic, functional, hermeneutic, semantic, historical-typological, comparative, comparative-terminological, genre-stylistic, communicative, as well as the proposed narrative method. The scientific novelty of the obtained results. For the first time in Ukrainian musicology: • fundamental Western and domestic theories of narrative have been systematized; • the scientific directions of narratology have been distinguished: semiotic (E. Tarasti, M. Grabócz), the theory of expressive genres (R. Hatten), and the theory of narrative archetypes (B. Almén); • the concepts of musical dramaturgy and musical narrative have been differentiated; • a narrative method of analyzing a musical work has been proposed, and its theoretical foundations have been substantiated based on the achievements of modern foreign narratology; • the analytical tools of G. Genette have been adapted to the specifics of the musical text, which allowed revealing the narrative semantics through the structure of the narrative; • a narrative analysis of the corpus of Ukrainian ballads of the 20th century (by Y. Meitus, B. Lyatoshynsky, L. Revutsky, S. Bortkiewicz, A. Shtoharenko, and others) has been carried out, which made it possible to determine the individualstylistic strategies of explicit and implicit musical narrativity. The following aspects have received further development: • the theory of musical dramaturgy; • the understanding of narrative as an interdisciplinary phenomenon of the modern humanities; • the theoretical comprehension of the genre semantics of the ballad; • the understanding of the specifics of narrative strategies in verbally determined (vocal) and immanently musical (instrumental) works.
