Principles of interpreting P. Tychyna’s poetry in the vocal cycle “Enharmonic” by L. Dychko
Background. Lesia Dychko (born in 1939) is one of the innovators in Ukrainian music of the second half of the 20th century. Among many composers, she is distinguished by the attraction to the music associated with the word. Despite the prevalence of the choral genre in her oeuvre, she pays a lot of attention also to opuses for the solo voice with the instrumental accompaniment. In the fi eld of chamber vocal music, there are characteristic signs of the composer’s style, the richness of the harmonic language, and the author’s fi ligree work with the poetic word. Such features of the L. Dychko’s creative personality are refl ected in the works of many researchers. However, currently there are no studies that addresses the principles of the embodiment of the poetic text. This reveals the relevance of the proposed topic. The purpose of the article is to identify the way in which the semantic and structural properties of P. Tychyna’s poems are refl ected in the song cycle “Enharmonic” by L. Dychko. The following methods have been used to solve the research tasks: historical, genrestyle, structural-functional and comparative. Results. Most of L. Dychko’s chamber vocal cycles for the voice and piano show the composer’s attraction to the heritage of Ukrainian poets, such as P. Grabowsky, V. Kolomiets, I. Franko, and P. Tychyna. The appeal to Tychyna’s poems is indicative of the composer’s aesthetic preference. The reason for the choice was the innovative nature of the poet’s works, which are inherent in poly-rhythm, poly-meter of the poetical lines, musicality of the content and structure, a combination of folklore samples and advanced techniques, and the rich world of images. All these signs already appeared in the fi rst book of P. Tychyna – “The Sun Clarinets” (1918). Its pages are fi lled with sophisticated landscapes, made with bright colours, radiating goodness and humanism. The poems of the collection are endowed with special musicality, numerous sound images, which resulted in the name of many compositions. In particular, the name of the poetic cycle selected by L. Dychko – “Enharmonic” – causes some musical association. It consists of four compositions. Their names describe the state of nature and target the perception of poems – “The Fog”, “The Sun”, “The Wind”, and “The Rain”. The fi gurative and semantic series of each of them is constructed so that their textual basis is a kind of “semantic enharmony” to the title. “Semantic enharmony” means the difference between the text and its name (or other text) by the meaning, but their similarity according to the meaning. To refl ect the rich fi gurative content of the works by P. Tychyna, L. Dychko uses the mixed technique. The synthesis of distant stylistic devices is inherent in all the semantic-structural levels of the romance “Enharmonic”. The proof of this is that the composer gives each composition of the cycle an additional genre designation that has a purely instrumental nature: “The Fantasy” (No. 1), “The Prelude” (No. 2), “The Pastoral” (No. 3), and “The Scherzo” (No. 4). In view of this, in the opus by L. Dychko two kinds of a cyclical composition are combined – vocal and instrumental. When joining poetic and musical rhythms, the composer usually relies on two different principles of the poetic text vocalization, which allows a subtle reproduction of all moods and emotional changes in the verses. In “The Fog” there is the recitation and counter-rhythm, in “The Wind” and “The Rain” the metric and accent increase. Only in “The Sun” metric scheme of the poetic source is retained almost completely. In the domain of the vocal melody, the author combines both the diatonic nature of the short songs with a specifi c modal colouration and chromatic feature and sharp tonal transitions. For example, in “The Fog” there is a gradual complication of melodies: from the Phrygian and Dorian modes with a limited interval to freely interpreted 12-tone space. In “The Wind”, the voice part can be divided into two types according to intonation features which are instrumental and recitativerecitational with song traits. A large mix of different techniques is also announced in the piano part. There is a harmony of classical-romantic type here, impressionistic linearity, and modern sonorous means. Such a variety of different types of the composition and principles of organization of the vertical helps L. Dych ko to convey the range of feelings of Tychyna’s poetry as accurately as possible. Such synthesis of the means of musical expression does not deprive the vocal cycle of integrity, which manifests itself both on the intonation level and on larger levels such as in the structure and principles of the approach to the embodiment of verses. In most cases, the composer limits the interval composition of the vocal melodies of romances, selecting those moves that would refl ect the semantics of the poetic primary sources most clearly. The basis consists of second, third, fourth, and fi fth intonations, and other moves are less common and serve to enhance the expression of the phrase. The unifying factor for all the works of the “Enharmonic” appears to be also the functional purpose of the piano part. It acts as an equal member of the vocal-piano duo and contributes to the implementation of the multilayer semantics of Tychyna’s poetry and its symbolic content. Some regularity also appears in the structure of romances, since “The Fog”, “The Wind” and “The Rain” have similar principles of construction. They are characterized by an improvisational character, a free expansion of the form with a change in the musical content of the sections, the variety of textual types and the culmination at the point of the golden section. “The Sun” is the exception. Its form has features of the couplet-variation structure, since the musical elements from the fi rst stanza are repeated at the beginning of the second, although their elevation is changing. Conclusions. In the embodiment of the symbolic poetry by P. Tychyna, L. Dychko shows an active author’s position, refl ects her vision of its content, emphasizing the important fi gurative and semantic-image units. An important role in this is played by the piano part, which serves as a vivid underline for the main images of the original sources, a kind of “enharmony” of their names. The foregoing confi rms that at the early stage of creativity L. Dychko had already proved herself as an initiative inventor; by combining various stylistic and style techniques, she found the musical equivalent of the content of the poems, revealed their subtext and embodied her own impressions of the perception of P. Tychyna’s poetry.