Savvina, L. V. Artistic Picture of the World in Music of the Second Half of the 20th Century: On the Question about the Structural-Semantic Invariants of Musical Thinking

Abstract: The article provides a review of music of the second half of the 20th century in the frame of the artistic culture and environment. The main peculiarity of that stage of development is the relation of music not only to various branches of art such as fine arts, literature, architecture, poetry, theatre, cinematograph but also to other branches of knowledge such as philosophy, esthetics, semiotics, linguistics, mathematics, physics, computer science and psychology. The author describes the two leading tendencies in music of the second half of the 20th century. One tendency relates to determinism, conditioned by the cause-and-effect relations and based on mathematics. The second tendency is based on indeterminism that views the chance and unpredictability as the esthetic ideal. This weakens the cause-and-effect relations, destroys the integrated composition and creates texts that are principally disconnected. The above mentioned tendencies are analyzed based on the example of a number of music pieces of the 20th century. The analysis is carried out taking into account these two tendencies. The two tendencies in music are associated with the two styles of composer’s thinking that are based on the two structural-semantic invariants. These are the informative thinking and synthesizing thinking. The first type is based on the combination of homogenous elements and has the following properties: - it is determined by the type of most-modern ‘scanning’ consciousness; - it was the result of the tendency towards determinism; - it is described with homogeneity that leads to programming of music; - it was born under the influence of exact sciences, in particular, mathematics; - it has the centralized nature due to the influence of centripetal tendencies. In the first case the prevalence of the rational beginning is caused by the properties of the artistic text oriented at exact sciences. The second type of thinking is based on the combination of heterogeneous properties and synthesizing texts involving interaction of various codes. It also has the following properties: - it is determined by the type of post-modernistic ‘articulatory’ consciousness; - it was the result of the tendency towards indeterminism; - it is described with heterogeneity and contrast music codes; - it has the decentralized nature due to the influence of centrifugal forces.

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