Traditions of F. Mendelssohn in the development of the miniatures genre in contemporary Ukrainian music.
The article considers the preconditions for miniatures genre appearance in art. The historical aspects of the genre development are analyzed. There was made the systematization and special study of piano music of contemporary Ukrainian composers. Miniature is a special branch of artistic creativity, which for many centuries retains its place in the genre hierarchy of various arts. It attracts the attention of painters, poets, musicians because of the possibility to convey great ideas in an extremely small volume, and in the mind of a viewer, reader, listener, it often acts as a peculiar measure of artist’s skills. From the perspective of the comments on the characteristic features of min-iatures contained in musical sources, we will try to construct a verbal model of it. Basing on the concept of E. Nazaikinsky, set forth in the work “Poetics of musical miniatures”. Many valuable ideas contained in this article can be divided into three main provisions. The principle of “great in the small”is realized in music through the mech-anisms of form compression. The principle “majestic in the small” points to the strong ties of the miniature with the outside world. These ties are realized through the principle of programmatics, genre associations, semantics of intonations. The principle of “antithetics” shows itself in the peculiar miniature characteris-tics, in particular the coexistence of the opposite qualities that form such pairs: autonomy – contextuality, artistic – applied, symbolism – decorative. Piano musicby F. Mendelssohn is considered innovative. The question about the development of a romantic miniature is solved by K. Zenkin. In his opinion, one of the lines of miniatures development arethe plays of applied nature, which served the official function: that is dancing and instructional plays. Another line of a romantic miniature development is associated with the tradition of creating plays for a pleasant pastime, that is, for home music. The third line in the minia-ture history is connected by a researcher with cyclic forms. It is about “internal facilitation, miniaturization of classical forms”, about middle parts of sonatas. The traditions of romantic miniature by F. Mendelssohn influenced the further development of this genre in Ukrainian music. The piano miniature in Ukrainian music has undergone several stages of development. The first references to this genre relate to the 18th and early 19th centuries, the first published samples include the Ukrainian folk dance “Dergunets” and the Ukrainian song “Yak matusia kazala”. piano plays by M. Markevich, A. Kotsipin-sky, I. Vytvytsky, A. Diubiuk. The Ukrainian musical culture of the 19th century, as noted in the monograph by M. Dremliuga, “was able to adopt and learn the European principles of creat-ing a miniature”. At the same time, as before, the works of this genre represented “typical examples of folk art adaptation, especially in the song and dance style”. Hence, there is a preservation of the appropriate stylistics, which affects all the expressive components of the musical language. It was widespread to use folk quotations. In the second half of the 19th century the development of Ukrainian piano art proceeded in the direction of a dominant romantic trend at that time. The em-bodiment of the national principle in music is deepened (through a generalized reflection of the national genres characteristic features; on the basis of folklore, the composers’ creation of themes of the original works: variations, “thoughts” and “noise”, elegies, rhapsodies, fantasies, suites, etc.). Since the 1960’s, the professionalization of piano creativity has been observed, especially in connec-tion with the works by M. Lysenko, whose “active ascetic activity contributed to the rise of Ukrainian piano music in the context of the European musical culture development”. The 80’s and early 90’s of the 19th century marked the appearance of a gal-axy of talented composers in the professional musical life of Ukraine, including M. Kalachevsky, P. Sokalsky, S. Vorobkevich, D. Sichinsky, N. Nizhankivsky, A. Lyzogub, M. Markevich and others. The lyric and romantic direction remains the leading one in Ukrainian piano music even in the first decades of the 20th century. Indicative in this aspect are the works by Y. Stepovoy, V. Kosenko, S. Lyudkevich, L. Revutsky. These musicians contributed to the further development of genres of small form and piano cycle on the Ukrainian ground. In the 20–30’s of the 20th century the image sphere of piano works expanded, new means of expressiveness appeared that were not used before. The genre of the Ukrainian piano miniature was subjected to significant influence of European modernism. In the Ukrainian composer’s practice, this was reflected in the expansion of the traditional figurative and thematic sphere, greatly enriching the expressive means. Such composers as L. Revutsky, B. Lyatoshinsky, V. Kosenko, S. Lyudkevich, V. Barvinsky fruitfully mastered Western style trends: impressionistic, expressive and neoclassic ones. Linguistic innovations were espe-cially evident precisely in the field of instrumentalism with its sensitivity to artistic experiments, that contributed to the miniatures genre enrichment in Ukrainian mu-sic. Moreover, contemplative-psychological imagery dominated by the meditative beginning indication. 40–50-ies of the 20th century are marked by ideological and artistic contradic-tions associated with the domination of regulatory aesthetics, social order, result-ing a decisive turning to the Soviet themes and increasing interest in program mu-sic. In the stylistics of works, there dominated the reliance on classical traditions, direct connection with folk sources (A. Kolomiyets, F. Nadenenko, M. Sylvansky, I. Shamo, I. Berkovych, and others). The piano style of the Ukrainian composers of the 60’s and 80’s develops in line with the polystylistictendencies, that are the characteristic of the given period of time. It absorbed the means of writing, peculiar for music of different eras: baroque, classicism, romanticism. At the same time, the desire for au-thorial individualization, originality, singularity of creative decisions increased (L. Grabovsky, V. Silvestrov, V. Bibik, Y. Ishchenko, V. Godzyatsky, I. Karabits). Modern Ukrainian composers have created a lot of highly artistic samples of this genre, also confirming the fruitfulness of the idea of classifying the miniature, its evolution in the musical-historical process of the past and present.