Intertextuality as a form of dialogue in the symphonic work of Andrei Eshpai

Dunaevskaya Alla Evgen'evna PhD in Art History Associate Professor; Department of History and Theory of Music; V. S. Popov Academy of Choral Art 125565, Russia, Moscow, Festivalnaya str., 2 novalyo@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Before starting to study the specifics of intertextual strategies in Andrei Eshpai's symphonic work, it should be emphasized that the master's name, along with the names of other great symphonists of the second half of the XX — early XXI century — A. Schnittke, S. Slonimsky, B. Tchaikovsky, B. Tishchenko, A. Pyart, S. Gubaidulina, E. Denisov, A. Karamanov, N. Condorff and many others identified the unique qualities of modern symphony, which not only ensured its preservation as a genre, but also allowed it to develop while maintaining a high artistic and value level. It is no coincidence that the symphony has now appeared in the musical art as a new diverse palette of compositions with a vivid personality and special semantic dynamism.

Andrey Yakovlevich Eshpai's symphonic oeuvre, represented by a voluminous corpus of works, continues the best traditions of the Russian school. This was greatly facilitated by the brilliant education that Eshpai received at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of N. Ya. Myaskovsky, and then from E. K. Golubev and A. I. Khachaturian. The composer told me: "The unparalleled personal qualities of Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky, combined with his high authority as the head of the Moscow school of composition, made communication with him extremely attractive. <...> I am extremely grateful to my other teachers, Evgeny Kirillovich Golubev and Aram Ilyich Khachaturian, who revealed to me many secrets of composing. I've been lucky in my life. I had excellent teachers" ^{[1; p. 19]}.

The composer often recalled the saying of N. Ya. Myaskovsky: "All you need is to be sincere, be passionate about art and lead your own line" (from a conversation with the composer). This teacher's instruction largely shaped his own creative position, which consists in striving for individuality, determined by a combination of talent, inspiration and skill.: "Great music comes from the heart. Music written only by applying technology is not worth the paper on which it is written" (from a conversation between the author of the article and the composer).

It is generally believed that Eshpay's symphonic achievements, as well as, for example, the achievements of B. Tchaikovsky, B. Tishchenko, M. Weinberg, were realized in the classical paradigm of modern music, characterized as "updating the genre within the canon" (M. G. Aranovsky). Indeed, the creative method of the master presupposes the partial preservation of canonical principles, that is, according to Yu.M. Lotman, we are talking about evolution, "based on overcoming the canon as an artistic system with the most pronounced number of restrictions by removing certain prohibitions or transferring them to the category of optional" ^{[2; p. 72]}.

N. S. Gulyanitskaya clarifies the definition of the direction of modern compositional creativity, which is based on the canon, as “not quite classical classics”, and calls it one of the leading ones in musical art. "When we come into contact with a modern work," the researcher writes, "we can find ourselves in the format of "sonatas", "cantatas", "symphonies", etc. — with an unusual shape, compositional principles, pitch mode and other parameters" ^{[3; p. 141]}.

It is important that in the spiritual situation of the turn of the century, when "the world lost its structure and order, lifted all prohibitions and sacred taboos" ^{[4; p. 266]}, the composers following the renewal of tradition, as well as the authors radically transforming the symphony, increasingly cease to be opponents. They begin to be united by the search for a unique aesthetic identity, the desire to synthesize new ways and rules of composing a genre in relation to each specific composition. "The old invariant of the symphony genre does not work at all today," A. L. Vinogradova—Chernyaeva rightly believes, "and its application to modern symphonies only gives disappointment, since ruins remain of the symphony (in the previous understanding)" ^{[5; p. 1642]}. The modern attitude towards the genre demonstrates a steady trend towards expanding the ways of reproducing worldviews, when the choice of the compositional and dramatic profile of compositions, writing techniques, and sound production methods is determined by the individuality of the author's idea.

At the same time, the fact of the diversity of compositional approaches to the symphony actualizes the existence of those "necessary and sufficient conditions" (S. Averintsev) that identify it and ensure its preservation. Conceptuality becomes one of these conditions, which presupposes the presence of a deep philosophical idea as a supra-textual component that forms the content saturation of the genre. Tracing the development of this trend, N. S. Gulyanitskaya argues that "in modern symphony, such an essential genre feature as conceptuality has not disappeared — a feature that has become central to symphonic thinking" ^{[6; p. 32]}. The same feature is emphasized by I. I. Nikolskaya. According to the author, modern symphony "continues to be a focus of conceptuality.": it is a view of the world and an attitude towards life, it is a reflection on its meaning and an ever-relevant search for its imperishable humanistic values, it is a person with his doubts, sufferings, alone with himself or with the external manifestations of being" ^{[7; p. 39]}.

Eshpay's symphonic oeuvre, which spans more than half a century, is marked by a variety of approaches to the genre: each of the compositions demonstrates individual poetics and is distinguished by its extraordinary "artistic power" (A. F. Losev). The composer, who masterfully mastered orchestral writing, argued that the orchestra is indispensable for the embodiment of large-scale philosophical ideas.: "I believe that the composition of a symphony orchestra is an ingeniously found organism capable of expressing the deepest thought" ^{[8; p. 54]}.

Eshpai embodied in his symphonic works a whole range of conceptual ideas: from subjective-psychological, which are in the key of the author's intimacy, to socio-moral and patriotic with their deep portrayal of archetypes; as well as sacred-religious and meditative-mystical, accompanied by spatial-temporal deconstruction. "All of Eshpai's symphonies are different both in concept and in time scale,— Ye noted. Svetlanov, — but they certainly have one thing in common — an extremely rich, capacious content, which is the basis of each of them" ^{[9; 48]}.

The defining "working principle" (S. Averntsev), which ensures the functioning of the conceptual-textual paradigm of symphonic compositions, is dialogic, which, on the one hand, is a categorical property of any text, and on the other hand, is implicitly located in the "memory" of the symphonic genre.

In musicology in recent decades, the problem of dialogue, based on the solid achievements of related sciences, has received quite a variety of aspects. "Musical dialogue," N. A. Braginskaya believes, —has a very wide range of applications, which sometimes leads to blurring of its boundaries" ^{[10; p. 9]}. Following the researcher's conclusions, we also note the lack of a unified approach to the concept of "dialogue" in musical art, since, in our opinion, such an approach is not necessary and hardly possible due to the breadth and semantic saturation of the phenomenon. On the contrary, the corpus of works characterized by a multi-vector scientific understanding of the problem under consideration is of particular value. The research focuses on various types and functions of dialogue, including:

• intertextual dialogue (L. S. Dyachkova, N. S. Gulyanitskaya, M. G. Aranovsky, I. S. Stogniy, V. N. Kholopova, E. E. Lobzakova, T. I. Esaulova, etc.);
• dialogue as a genre feature of concertina (B. V. Asafyev, E. M. Samoylenko, E. N. Denisova);
• dialogue of various semiotic systems, for example, music and words (Yu. M. Oparina, A. G. Kremer); academic and popular culture (A.M. Zucker);
• dialogue as a phenomenon of meaning formation (M. E. Porokhovnichenko, G. A. Demeshko, V. V. Medushevsky);
• dialogue of musical and linguistic means: timbre-textural dialogue (T. N. Krasnikova, E. G. Zakharova),
• dialogue of high-pitch systems, polystructure (N. S. Gulyanitskaya).

A universal definition of dialogue, where it is interpreted as an immanent property of culture, was proposed by Yu. M. Lotman. Acting as a form of correlation between the elements of the system, dialogue becomes a fundamental mechanism for the formation of culture as a dynamic model. The interaction of semiotic systems, which inevitably arises in dialogical discourse, leads to the generation of meanings and the creation of new cultural codes. In addition, it is important for us that dialogue, according to Lotman, can be represented both by intertextual relationships, where elements belonging to different historical and cultural traditions are included in the dialogue, and by intratextual ones occurring between genres or "multidirectional structural arrangements" ^{[11; p. 144]}.

Within the framework of the symphonic genre, dialogue accumulating intertextual and intratextual strategies plays a key role in shaping the conceptual space, fixing the points of intersection of meanings — their development, unification or separation, transformation or disappearance. It is specific that intra-textual dialogems usually operate on one of the most important principles embedded in the deep "memory" of the genre, namely, the principle of binarity, based on the ambivalent nature of opposites and their ability to actively dialogue. The idea of binarity determines the logic of symphonic thinking, determining the form of compositions, their dramatic settings and contributing to the selection of appropriate complexes of artistic techniques.

This idea is in many ways close to the conclusions of E. V. Nazaikinsky, who discusses dialogue from this perspective, pointing to various aspects of its implementation in a musical text — thematic, tonal-harmonic, intonation — and concluding that dialogue belongs to the syntactic scale level of musical form ^{[12; p.2-14]}.

As for the intertextual relationships, they, being directed outward and aimed at creating a multidimensional musical and stylistic space of composition, are the process of artistic communication of the author's text with other languages, styles, and cultural discourses, carried out at various structural levels.

The theory of intertextual dialogue in the cultural system has a long tradition, and the conclusions and achievements of the various fields of the humanities that have studied it have unconditional value for musicology. This problem was dealt with, for example, by the most prominent philosophers: K. Levi-Strauss, M. Heidegger, N. S. Trubetskoy. In the twentieth century, the theory of dialogue, growing in new meanings, became part of other scientific paradigms, primarily linguistics and literary studies, cultural studies and sociology. It was considered in the aspect of ethnography and intercultural interactions (L. N. Gumilev), the study of culture as a universal mind (V. S. Bibler).

The ideas of M. M. Bakhtin, who calls dialogue a universal, all-encompassing way of existence of culture and man in culture, become extremely important in understanding the theory of dialogue ^{[13; p. 71]}. Specifying cultural dialogue in the concept of polyphonism and noting the diversity of its components, which can be styles, epochs, genres, languages, Bakhtin points to the constant renewal of meanings in the dialogue. As if overcoming "time in time", the dialogue opens up new semantic possibilities for cultures of past eras: "When two cultures meet, they do not merge or mix, each retains its unity and open integrity, but they are mutually enriched" ^{[14; p. 508]}.

Bakhtin's theory of dialogue, as is well known, is based on the theory of intertextuality of structuralist philosophers Yu. Kristeva and R. Barth, one of the basic criteria of which is dialogic. Thus, Barth's "polyphonic text" is a "space of quotation" or a code that generates "fragments of something that has already been read, seen, committed, experienced: the code is the trace of this already" ^{[15, p. 45]}. At the same time, the author, according to the scientist, only draws letters from the immeasurable dictionary of Culture.

The musicologist M. S. Bonfeld highly appreciated the importance of Bakhtin's theory of dialogue. Justifying the category of "artistic reality", the researcher characterizes it as an act of dialogue with the past, based on Bakhtin's statement: "In every word there are voices, sometimes infinitely distant, nameless, almost impersonal (voices of lexical shades, styles, etc.), almost elusive, and voices close, sounding almost simultaneously" [Cit. according to: 16; p. 126].

The vector of scientific understanding of dialogics, which is thought of as the result of intertextual and intercultural interactions, can be seen in many other musicological works. Thus, M. G. Aranovsky states: "Intertextuality should be considered as communication between art objects. The texts themselves communicate. They influence each other both by the information they carry and by the ways in which they encode it" ^{[17; p. 65]}.

N. S. Gulyanitskaya, based on the analysis of foreign musicological works, defines intertextuality as "a dialogue with the stylistics of the "other", while distinguishing the concepts of another text as borrowings and directly intertextuality, suggesting broader conventional connections ^{[18; p. 78]}. V. N. Kholopova points out the musical language of modernity, which sounds in the key of dialogue between different cultures and historical epochs and caused the phenomenon of polystylistics ^{[19; p. 125]}.

In our work, the theory of intertextual relations proposed by the French literary critic Gerard Genette may be productive, where intertexuality is characterized in a narrower sense, namely, as the direct presence of one text in another, presented in the form of quotations, allusions, reminiscences, stylizations ^{[20; pp. 54-55]}. The use of Genette's typology seems to us to be quite reasonable and can contribute to a more differentiated analysis, since Andrei Eshpai's symphonic work, despite the absence of radical eclecticism in it, actively operates with various forms of intertextual dialogue. Thus, according to Genette's theory, some of the compositions are marked by paratextual connections: they are actualized through program titles (such as the Second Symphony "Praise the Light!", the Sixth Symphony "Liturgical", the Ninth Symphony "Four Poems", etc.); through epigraphs (for example, in the First, Second, Seventh, Eighth Symphonies); through poetic and spiritual texts (Sixth and Ninth Symphonies). Specifically, the Fourth Symphony is characterized by hypertextuality, being a composition derived from the ballet Krug ("Remember!"). Metatextuality inspires the interrelationships between the composition "Suvorov's Crossing the Alps" and the opera by M. I. Glinka "Life for the Tsar", as well as the Solemn Overture by P. I. Tchaikovsky "1812" through iconic quotations that acquire the meaning of cultural and historical symbols in a new context with their high degree of recognition and the ability to evoke stable associations.

"Eshpai is an example of a truly modern artist who has accumulated in his work a wide variety of layers (whether it is Mari folklore or classical art, music of the 20th century and especially his beloved Ravel or, finally, jazz) and found that "golden mean" that defines his compositional face — what we call a vibrant identity, individuality" ^{[8; p. 8]}.

Intertextuality, as one of the leading forms of dialogue, becomes an indicator of the composer's style, marked by the formation of multidirectional musical and stylistic counterpoints. In this article, we will limit ourselves to considering dialogical interactions with Mari folklore, one of the dominant linguistic and intonational layers in the composer's work. When referring to the Mari folk song, Eshpai repeatedly expressed the idea that "the more national an artist is, the more individual he is" (from a conversation with the composer). Andrey Yakovlevich, noting the important features of using folklore sources in professional art, believed that accessing them requires great skill, taste, and tact: "The distance from a folklore sample to one's own word in music is especially important: a composer is born here, becoming a personality in art" (from a conversation with the composer).

The artist's creative conviction that the relationship with folk song is a timeless national art form brings him closer to both the traditions of the Russian school of composition of past eras and the neo-folklore of modernity. It is the soil character, the deep connection of Eshpai's creativity, as a native of the Mari land, with the aesthetics and language of his native culture that becomes the most important feature of his author's thinking. Moreover, most of the Mari songs, dances and plays, filling with their distinctive intonation the sound of many Eshpai compositions — from symphonies and concerts to chamber works and piano pieces, were mostly borrowed from the ethnographic collections of his father, Ya. A. Eshpai— a composer and musicologist-folklorist, who had a serious influence on the formation of the creative personality of the master.

"My homeland is the Volga. My mother is Russian, my father is Marie. His father was born and raised in the Mari village of Kokshamary, his mother — on the other bank of the great Russian river, in the village of Akulev. I was born in 1925 in the city of Kozmodemyansk. Our family's life has always been connected with the Mari folk song. My father, a composer and folklorist, devoted his whole life to her" (From a conversation between the composer and Z. Dudina. URL: https://kidsher.ru/ru/people/1512/).

Being permanent objects of reception, folklore samples act in a musical text as conceptual units of the author's artistic world, transmitting essential characteristics close to him. Such, for example, is a quote from the Mari song "The Sun is rising", on the basis of which one of the main themes of the first movement of the Second Symphony is based, the semantic genesis of which is deeply connected with the concepts of beauty and spiritual transformation. It is specific that the intonational appearance of the Mari melody is completely preserved here. A. Khasanova and O. Orekhova, comparing this theme with the original source, note the invariance of the sonorous structure of the folk song. "Intonation transformations," the authors claim, "affected only one note of the forschlag in the second minor line, which made it possible to preserve the pentatonic structure of the melody ^{[21; p. 20]}.

The Mari melody, representing a structure based on a quarter-fifth melodic movement performed within the framework of an anhemitone fret, seems to be permeated with a soft glow, exposed by a solo bassoon, contrabassoon and cello.

The communication of the author's text with the folklore sample is carried out through a special style of timbre texture, determined by variationally polyphonic "conditions" that contribute to the preservation of the quotation and, at the same time, dynamize it. If the expositional presentation of the theme is framed by a variably ostinate background resembling a lullaby, then in the first variation the background voices include new elements - light chords of woodwinds and trumpets, as well as syncopated descending quartette motifs; at the same time, the theme itself is colored by the timbres of bass clarinets, bassoons and duplicated by violas in a fifth. The stretchy combination of register-contrasting sound lines underlying the second variation recreates a quotation in a quarto (piccolo flutes, flutes, oboes and bassoons, contrabassoons, cellos and double basses). The textured background, represented by quarto-fifth and tritone duplications of the "lullaby" motif, significantly increases the intensity of the sound, which is facilitated by the change in the fret status to E-Mixolydian.

Another "semantic task" is defined by the dialogic discourse in the Third and Eighth Symphonies, which are dedicated to the memory of his father. Andrey Yakovlevich always spoke about his father with special reverence and love, always appreciating his contribution to the Mari culture: "My father was amazingly talented. I'm not just talking about music, although here his creative nature manifested itself in a very peculiar way. It seems to me that he sacrificed a lot as the author of his own musical ideas in order to show the true nature of Mari pentatonics, which was still little known in those years" ^{[1, p. 17]}.

The memorial symphonies, full of tragedy and reflections on the meaning of human life, are, in fact, a dialogue with the father, in the formation of which quoting Mari folklore samples becomes an important linguistic device. The communication of the author's text and borrowed material becomes a "generator of meaning" and a genre-forming factor in the writings, where quotations serve as representations of the memory of the father.

In the text of the Third Symphony, quotations are at the heart of the main and side parts of the first movement.: these are the Mari songs "Down your Street" (the main part) and "The Waters flow" (the side part). The citation process itself is based on the transformation of borrowed material in the author's artistic and linguistic context. Both folklore themes are reinterpreted with the help of timbre coloring, textured work, intonation and genre transformations.

This is especially true of the song "Down your Street", which, fulfilling the function of the main thematic idea of the entire symphony, is reinterpreted most significantly. So, already at the beginning, the mournful lyrical presentation of the string ensemble, marked by a constant exceeding of the range and an increase in the number of voices, is replaced by a mystical, transcendental chorale of woodwinds, accompanied by chromatization of the diatonic melody. It is characteristic that the middle section of the main part is based on one of the key intonations of the quoted melody – the intonation of the minor third. Set out in an already recognizable syncopated rhythm, it becomes the grain of an imitative five—voice, where it is "distorted" in serial conditions, alternately changing the structure to um ₃, b ₃, um ₄, h ₄. In the third section of the main part, the Mari theme is present, but almost inaudible in a layered dense tutti chanting harsh chord dissonances - quartaccords, octave-symmetric complexes.

The final performance of the theme "Down your street" in the finale of the symphony is full of fanfare-"bell-like" sounds: here the time duration of the theme is increased, "voiced" by brass instruments and accompanied by repetitions of quarter-second harmonic turns.

Eshpai spoke about the folklore melody "Waters flow", recalling the tragic events: "My father died on February 23, 1963. In recent days, he has only been lying down, not talking. Then I sat down at the piano and played the melody of "The Waters are flowing." The father shed tears. I didn't know the words to that tune at the time. "The waters flow, but the shores remain… We leave, you stay..."When I found out the content of the song, I was shocked by my father's tears" (From the composer's conversation with Z. Dudina. URL: https://kidsher.ru/ru/people/1512/).

With its mournful semantics, the Mari chant "Waters Flow" is encrusted into a motionless textured continuum of strings formed by the slow pulsation of the quintaccord pedals. Thanks to the intonation of the solo flute, an atmosphere of poetry and, at the same time, through mystery is created here, enhanced by rhythmic "fading" on the last sounds of phrases devoid of temporal symmetry.

Let us also turn to the two Mari melodies used in the Eighth Symphony. Dialogical communication with the Mari musical material here takes place using other techniques, which are primarily aimed at recreating the change of the space-time vector. Overcoming the linear flow of time is carried out using an editing technique that gives each quote a local character and creates the impression of a short-term chronotopic switching.

Thus, the first theme, the quote from the orphan song "How to be left without a father," is based on a descending variant-sequence development in a variable fret and resembles a lullaby with its rhythmic dimension and intonational softness. It is introduced once into the text at the beginning of the coda of the first part, forming a contrast to the previous, mystically mysterious sound atmosphere created by the chromatic interweaving of the "whirls" of woodwind and harp strings against the background of static string pedals, turning into a mournful polyphonic chorale. The composer himself described the melody as "light and sadness" and said that this theme was very dear to him, because his father touched it: "This is how I see my father's face" (from a conversation with the composer).

The composer called the second Mari theme, which is set out in the code of the fourth movement, "sorokovina." She ends the symphony by contrasting her reflective sound with the previous tragic sound patterns.

It should be emphasized that both folklore melodies are also colored by the timbre of a solo flute, which sounds with special tenderness and sadness in the atmosphere of an almost completely "silent" orchestra. However, if the solo of the first theme is complemented by a sub—voice of violas when repeated, then the second folklore quotation is the only voice in the musical space. The lonely mournful melody covers the range of d-Dorian with descending syncopated second movements, accentuating the sounds of "h" and "d" as variable supports, and ending with a long chant of the main tone against the background of uniform harp beats on open strings in the lower register, depicting a memorial bell.

So, we found out that in the considered works, quoting folklore material acts as a leading tool for creating dialogic discourse, which, by enhancing textual multidimensionality, contributes to the organic integration of the Mari tradition into the artistic paradigm of symphonies.

We have established that, acting as the linguistic code of the writings, folklore material contributes to the construction of a denotative-connotative text system that characterizes the author's belonging to the Mari cultural tradition. Being used in memorial compositions, the folklore component also becomes a symbol of personal tragedy and personal memory of the composer. Quotations, being located in the strong positions of the musical text, determine the type of connections of all elements of the system.: they form the drama of the "plot", contribute to the development of compositional logic and the choice of a set of artistic techniques consistent with the principles of transformational poetics.

By translating their own linguistic rules, the tunes actualize the processes of adjusting the Mari diatonics and author's vocabulary, which result in the convergence of folklore quotations with the technical and stylistic parameters of modernity. At the same time, these processes lead to the selection of means that contribute to the preservation of the intonational appearance of the tunes and their structural integrity: first of all, we are talking about the variational development that changes the "textured landscape" of the musical fabric, as well as the installation inclusions of quotations. In addition, the orchestral "reintoning" of a folk song, marked by the translation of a word belonging to it into a deep state of "ineffability", is accompanied by timbre modeling of melodies, which not only emphasizes the folklore specificity of the melodies, but also performs the function of naming the meaning.

In our opinion, the dialogical interaction with Mari folklore in the texts of Eshpai's symphonic scores is based on stylistic synthesis, which, according to V. V. Medushevsky, is an intermediate type of dialogue located between mono and multi. polystylistics. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that the dialogue strategies chosen by the composer become characteristic not only for one work, but also manifest themselves in his other compositions, representing the composer's style and his affiliation to the Mari folklore tradition ^[22]. Intertextual interactions based on stylistic synthesis, in our opinion, turn out to be one of the most powerful intertextual strategies forming the conceptual space of Eshpay's symphonic opuses.