Music History Department KNUA. Vectors of scientific activity.
Under consideration are scientific achievements of the Music History Department of the Kharkiv National University of Arts over 70 years of its existence. The paper pro-vides assessment of the scientific contribution to the national musicology made by the luminaries of the department – G. A. Tiumienieva, I. M. Miklashevsky, B. A. Liubimov. Particular attention is paid to the works of G. A. Tiumienieva, the founder and head of the department, her monographs “Gogol and Music”, “Life and Creative Work of N. Ko-liada”, articles “Music in Repin’s Life”, publications on the influence of Ukrainian folk melodies on the work of Russian and Ukrainian composers. New for the Soviet musico-logy was the showcasing of not only breadth, but also the depth of “Ukrainisms” pen-etration into the musical “speech” of Russian composers and, especially Tchaikovsky. Posthumous edition of the author – a book about N. Koliada, a contemporary and fellow practitioner of Galina Alexandrovna in the class of S. S. Bohatyriov – allowed to revive the name of one of the brightest representatives of the Ukrainian musical avant-garde. The publication of vocal and choral works by Koliada, edited by G. Tiumienieva, led to the introduction of his music into the performance practice. An attempt is made to outline the periodization in the history of the department science. The first period, started by the activity of the luminaries, was continued by the research practice of the first graduates of the Kharkiv Conservatory (N. A. Pirogova, L. I. Mitskaya, Z. B. Yuferov). Thanks to the candidate thesis of Z. B Yuferova, the musical community learnt the name of an unknown Ukrainian composer V. I. Sokalsky (1863-1919). Following I. M. Miklashevsky, N. A. Pirogova studied the music life of Kharkiv in the 20-30s of the 20th century. The second period is marked by a turn to new methodological searches, mastering the culturological approach to studying music of the past and the present. The leader of new trends was M. R. Cherkashina, a graduate of G. À. Tiumienieva. In her candidate thesis “Modern Psychological Opera” she started to research pieces that had long been forbidden by officials from culture: “Katerina Iz-mailova” by D. Shostakovich, “Gambler” by S. Prokofiev, “Wozzeck” by A. Berg. The research touched upon other little known at the time operas by Menotti, Britten, Schoenberg. At the same time, a new approach to the study of the opera began to develop – it included the study of both the composer’s intent and its scenic embodiment. The opera phenomenon was further investigated in the book “Opera of the twentieth century”, and then in his doctoral dissertation “Historical Opera of the Romantic era.” New was a broad cultural approach, in the light of which the picture of opera art of the first half of the 19th century was otherwise covered. Along with the classics of the opera genre, the names of the authors, who were considered to be secondary, were introduced into the research process, the significance of famous composers’ (Meyerbeer) creativity was revised. For the first time the European context of the Russian classical opera study was introduced, an original evaluation of the opera “Ivan Susanin” was given. At the same time, the first scientific monograph on A. Serov, whose compositional work had never been the subject of the extensive study before, was written. I. Ya. Belenkova contributed to the department science, too: she was one of the first in the Union to be engaged in the development of music semiotics issues, and then she switched to the study of Russian classics. Exploring the dialogue in P. Tchaikovsky îperas, she created the author’s technique for analyzing operatic dialogues. Other new directions in the scientific activity of the department connected with the study of the mu-sical avant-garde of the twentieth century, popular mass music, functional (production) music, and others, are shown. Special focus was made on scientific activity of T. V. Krasnopolskaya, her fascina-tion with folklore in the years of work at the department was further extended in the Petrozavodsk Conservatory, where she became the most authoritative specialist in the field of Finno-Ugrian folklore. The paper also highlights the achievements of the modern period in the life of the department. They are associated with the names of lecturers who came to the depart-ment in the 80s and later. The philosophical and culturological approach was used in O. Lysiana’s monograph “Ways of the Russian and Ukrainian music culture develop-ment: from the Middle Ages to the 19th century”, which became a generalization of her author’s training course. Interest in modern methods of research, combined with deman-ding academic culture of scientific thinking, distinguishes the works of A. A. Mizitova and I. L. Ivanova devoted to the creativity of the twentieth century composers (“Myth and opera in musical theater of I. Stravinsky”, “Fragments of Valentin Bibik’s creative work”, “Poetics of the performance and worries in the 19th century Russian opera and the opera theatre of S. Prokofiev”), the theory and history of the genre (“Waltz in piano music of the 19th – early 20th centuries”). They are the authors of the first Ukrainian-language textbook, where the history of Western European, Russian and Ukrainian mu-sic is considered in parallel from the Baroque to the first half of the 19th century. The textbook on the history of the opera published in Kiev by the graduates of the music history department M. Cherkashina, G. Kukol and I. Ivanova was especially noted. The contribution to the department science made by other staff members, as well as its representatives working in other cities of Ukraine and abroad, is highlighted. The conclusion is made about the significant contribution of Kharkov music and historical school representatives into the Ukrainian musicology, about its high authority among similar structural divisions of music universities of Ukraine.