Male Singing as an Acquisition of Religious-Ritual and Theatrical-Opera Activities

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to substantiate the specificity of male singing skills as the first and leading in the history of musical and cultural events and to formulate the fundamental methodological and singing differences in religious-ritual and theatrical-opera detections. The methodological basis is the intonation approach as an idea of the genetic commonality of musical thinking and speech in the traditions of the concepts of B. Asafiev and B. Yavorskyi in Ukraine, which is presented in the works of D. Androsova, O. Kozarenko, O. Markova, O. Ohanezova, O. Roshchenko, O. Sokolova, V. Shulhina. Scientific novelty is manifested in the independence of classification developments regarding the characteristics of male singers in the ritual-religious and theatre-opera spheres, for the first time in the musicology of Ukraine and China, it is pointed out the fundamental difference between the religious and ritual detection of singing, mostly male, in register-interval indicators, which are incompatible with speech detections as signs of materially-real sound experience. Conclusions. From the ritual-religious primacy comes the practice of focusing on the voice detection within the framework of ritual-religious actions of sounds associated with supernatural abilities of contact with the extra-human world, the basis of which is the male voice, able to master the registers accessible to women's vocal expression, which is later fixed in the falsetto singing of men, although the distinctive side of sacredness both in the West and in the East is the skill of male fables. The transcendental meaning of such ritual sound expression is reinforced by interval-register measures, among which either "drumming" on one or two sounds or interval-register "jumps" that remove the respiratory-speech "wave" line of pitch sequences prevail. Theatrically, the operatic approach, relying on the artificiality of vocals (as a legacy of European church practice) or its analogies in the Chinese singing tradition, metaphorically and consistently combines that singing artificiality with speech-pathetic inflections, i.e. compensatingly combining the experience of addressing the superphysical world with speech-physical sound signs.