«Urban music» in intermedial and artistic studies of Ukrainian culture of the 1920’s

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reveal the “consonance” of urban-artistic reflections of musical and literary works in intermedial-eminent context. The research methodology are based on the complementary principle. The intermedial approach to the study of various artistic codes in one work was applied, as well as to the search of the consonant symbols and signs of a city in different types of synchronic and artistic practice. System-analytical, typological and comparative methods have been used in drawing the parallels and finding the coincidences and differences of realization of the “urban music” in the piano cycle “A Notebook of Miniatures” by the composer Mykola Zaderatskyi and a in the novel “City” written by V. Pidmohylnyi.  A receptive methodology, as well as the empirical methods of description, observation and reflection, has been applied. Scientific novelty lies in an attempt of an intermedial comparison of the images of urban sounding in modernistic works of different arts by means of semantic-semiotic interferences. A concept of eminence has been used for the first time for a comparative characteristic of the urban music in the artifacts of the Ukrainian culture of the Industrialization era. Conclusions. Various scenes, pictures, emotional reactions, “technocratic” symbols became common audial-semiotic images of the city in the program-cyclic and novelistic discourses.  The contrasts of sounding of the natural beauty of the clouds and artificial aesthetics of the machines, the silence as a contemporary island of self-concentration and “muscular strength” of the crowd (according to V. Zaderatskyi, Jr.), song folklore and a jazz band, a flashy poster and a spinning carousel in a symbolic and intermedial way reflect the interaction of sociological and psychological aspects of urbanism, i.e. personal and collective (private and public), contemplative and effective, emotional and rational, spiritual and material. “Notebook of Miniatures” and “musical-audial” fragments of “City” – are “eminent texts” (H. G. Gadamer) which interpret the encoded in them additional foreign medial contents (verbal – in a musical piece, and musical – in a literary work).

Key words: urbanism, urban music, composer, writer, novel, piano cycle, intermediality, eminent text.