On the Coverage of Piano Art in Galician Journalism of the 1930s (Purpose, Problematics, Conceptual Author’s Priorities)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the coverage of piano art by the first Ukrainian professional musicologists in Galician journalism of the 1930s. The methodology of the study is based on the application of special historical (source, comparative and historical-typological), epistemological and generalising methods of analysis. The scientific novelty is that for the first time in Ukrainian musicology an attempt was made to analyse the thematic journalistic work of the first Ukrainian professional musicologists of a certain historical period. They promoted Ukrainian musical culture, explained to the general public the stylistic features of piano composition and the "secrets" of performance. For the first time, the object of attention is studied as a separate typified phenomenon in the context of the development of science in the first third of the twentieth century. Conclusions. The analysis of the publicistic legacy of S. Liudkevych and N. Nyzhankivsky, dedicated to the piano art, has shown that its authors, reacting to events and analysing creativity and performance, showed a greater (the former) or lesser (the latter) breadth of topics (in addition to creativity and performance, S. Liudkevych often touched upon educational problems), different types of presentation of thoughts (analytical and descriptive, respectively), different degrees of coverage of the topic (phenomenon, portrait), different types of expression (calm, attentive to details, principled in critical remarks, or pictorial – expressive, emotionally uplifting), showed different criteria for assessing the phenomenon (from the standpoint of social and artistic utility or personal taste/impression). Thus, they demonstrated the versatility of Ukrainian piano journalism and a new (professionally dictated) level of critical analysis, which has emerged in this period of development of scientific and critical thinking.

Keywords: musical journalism, individual creativity, piano art, innovation, genre, style.