About the ways of giving musical meaning

Chuprova Irina Aleksandrovna ORCID: 0000-0002-6667-1136 PhD in Philosophy Senior Lecturer; A.F. Shishkin Department of Philosophy; Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 119454, Russia, Moscow, Vernadsky , 76 ir.a.chuprova@my.mgimo.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Many works have been devoted to the study of the problem of the embodiment of musical content. The variety of theoretical approaches is due to the use of various research optics: from developments in the field of music theory (for example, understanding the problems of intonation, form, harmony, fret, rhythm, texture, etc.) to research on the psychological aspects of the creative process (peculiarities of musical perception, hearing, memory, thinking, etc.), ethnopsychology, cross-cultural communication, etc. Thus, among the recognized musicological works, among other things concerning the problem of the embodiment of musical content, the works of Aranovsky M. G. ^[1], Mazel L. A. ^{[2, 3]}, Tyulin Yu. N. ^[4], Medushevsky V. V. ^[5], Asafiev B. V. ^[6] and others; in the field of psychological knowledge should be mentioned the achievements of Nazaikinsky E. V. ^[7], Kirnarskaya D. K. ^{[8, 9]} and others. In addition, the problem of meaning (including the meaning of musical "utterance") is of interest to researchers working in the field of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture, and intercultural communication: Silantieva M. V., Glagolev V. S., Tarasov B. N. ^[10]. A major researcher of music, considered as a subject of philosophical reflection, is Losev A. F. ^{[11, 12]}, in whose texts the philosophical understanding of the problems of musical existence is expanded extensively and widely. The listed works illustrate the variety of positions and points of view (represented not only by the above works), which suggests that there is sufficient research interest in this issue. At the same time, it should be noted that any theoretical understanding necessarily resorts to various kinds of generalizations, which are designed to highlight the most characteristic features of the problem under study. At the same time, the specificity of creative activity (from the creation of an artistic work to its "presentation" to the listener / viewer / reader) is determined by a significant proportion of uniqueness, "dissimilarity", originality of the creative act, which creates a certain difficulty for constructing correct theoretical generalizations. The scientific study of a unique, including a unique culture, a unique artist (as a creator in general or as a creator representative of a particular culture and creative direction / school, etc.) and his creations, it seems, can hardly be limited to creating some kind of universal matrix capable of unambiguously "fixing" the general without losing the unique. In addition, it seems appropriate to note that any research optics is also a representative of a certain picture of the world, the formation of which, among other things, is associated with the value foundations of the "mother" culture, tradition, and school. With this in mind, the present study is conceived as an attempt to philosophically comprehend the ways of giving musical meaning, including, among other things, an analysis of the expressive possibilities of the musical means themselves, as well as the role of the personality of the musician-performer as a carrier of national culture, in whose activities a kind of "unity of heterogeneous" is represented: time, style, tradition, school, national musical thinking, etc.

The main part

Among the significant number of ways to represent musical content, one of the most significant is musical intonation, intonation, considered in musicology from various theoretical positions. One of the points of view is the understanding of intonation, intonation in instrumental performance as a meaningful sound production, a meaningful "taking" of sound (or sounds), for example, interval, motive, etc., In particular, "pianists have many opportunities to emphasize the hidden tension of intonation. For a fraction of a second, a delayed sound, a subtle ratio of sounds in dynamics, expressive plastic intonation of a finger, hand, arm, back, body, barely noticeable facial movement — and the suffering soul of music opens to the soul of the listener" ^{[5, pp. 18-19]}.

In addition, in musical science, intonation is analyzed in the context of the development of the melodic line ^[13]; the possibilities of its (musical intonation) are investigated as a means of shaping ^[14]; intonation is considered as a semantic-sound unity as the basis of musical thinking ^{[6, 15]}, endowed with the possibilities of sense-setting. The latter approach interprets musical thinking as a multivariate understanding of the nature of the connection between sound and meaning, which is revealed, among other things, in the peculiarities of using one or another timbre coloring, methods of articulation, phrasing, the specifics of rhythmic patterns associated with pitch, dynamics, register and many other means of musical expression acting in their unity — all this determines the directions of the unfolding of meaning in a musical utterance.

In the context of understanding intonation as a meaningful unit of music, it is interesting to consider it as a kind of "intonation formula" bearing certain features of emotional experiences (for example, the intonation of "sadness", "sigh", "crying", "sorrow", "longing" and many others, one of the artistic examples of the use of such semantic figures — "The Lament of Dido" from Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas" ^[16]), human characters, features of natural phenomena, etc. The variety of expressive possibilities of intonation can be thought of as a kind of dictionary of life manifestations (such an idea begins to form in the musical art of the XVII—XVIII centuries, interesting examples can be found in the works of French harpsichordists: Louis Claude Ducken ("Cuckoo"), Francois Couperin ("Reapers", "Cuckoos"), etc.).

However, in addition to revealing the emotional side, illustrativeness, sound recording, the expressive potential of musical intonation is found in an attempt to fix a certain content similar to the concept. We are talking about a leitmotif or a whole system of leitmotives ^{[17, 18, 19]}, as, say, in the operatic works of Richard Wagner or the works of Alexander Scriabin, where the semantic core-intonation acts as a certain ontological basis, an instrument of formation, a carrier of an idea, a whole musical-dramatic concept, the principle of building the dramaturgy of a musical composition (a similar function they can carry a leitharmony, a leittimbra, a leitrythm, etc., for example, the meaningful and expressive meaning of the Tristan chord (or Tristan chord, or Tristan chord) by Richard Wagner is known ^{[3, pp. 438-455]}). An equally interesting example of expressions of meaning can be peculiar musical "ciphers", monograms, indicating, for example, the proper names of composers and having at the same time a serious musical and semantic load: VASN (b - a — c — h) — Johann Sebastian Bach (unfinished triple fugue from the cycle "The Art of Fugue"), DSCH (d — es — c — h) — Dmitry Shostakovich (String Quartet No. 8 (c-moll), Op. 110, "... an amazing story about himself, his place in his life, his search for truth, disappointments and, nevertheless, victories, victories spirit, victories, maybe for others, for those who were not given to stand up, but to whom Shostakovich considered himself obliged to win" ^[20]). Such sound complexes and their semantic role are another way of manifesting the essence of music ^{[21, 22]}. The listed "semantic attributes" are designed to reveal the volume and depth of semantic layers, "highlighting" the possibilities, including intonation, intonation in the process of the phenomenon of semantic angles of a musical work, their semantic flexibility and mobility.

At the same time, it is no secret that to some extent the nature of intonation and musical work with meaning are determined by features not only musical. These include, for example, a national tradition, understood in a broad sense, as something that feeds on both folklore intonations ^[23] and the peculiarities of the national language (speech intonation, "musicality" of speech) or other manifestations of national mentality ^{[24, 25, 26, 27]}. The peculiarities of the "speech style" can find their response not only in vocal music, where the word and music are directly connected, and the word is an equal participant in the musical narrative, but also in instrumental compositions. In addition, the peculiarities of everyday life, national poetry, dance tradition are significant (mazurkas, polonaises by Frederic Chopin are an expressive example here) and other "carriers" of ethnic or national flavor and worldview. It seems that the personality of the musician is also very significant in the phenomenon of meaning, concentrating in itself the general and special, unique, personal: the "face" of the author, performer, editor of the musical text, etc. Let's turn to a specific example: the editorial work of musicians. For example, Beethoven's sonatas edited by Arthur Schnabel or Alexander Goldenweiser are known ^[28], various editions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach (Karl Czerny, Bruno Mugellini, Ferruccio Busoni, etc.) and many other works of world musical literature edited by musicians who, to very varying degrees, introduce (or do not introduce) features into the author's compositional text of a different time, culture, thinking and, therefore, representing meaning in their own way. Often at the same time, according to researchers, editors with their own opinion "sin ... against the style of the edited author. ... they look at the music of Bach and Beethoven from the point of view of their time, the state of musical tastes and stylistic principles of the day when they started working on the editorial, instead of being transported to the environment in which this music was created" (italics by L. Roizman) ^[29]). At the same time, of course, there are examples of a very careful attitude to the composer's original thought.

The above illustrates the high complexity of the attempt to "fix" a certain "specific content" for a musical creation, which, nevertheless, does not indicate the absence of a certain meaning or meanings ("semantic constants"). The essence of the question lies in the possibility and extent of fixing such a meaning, as well as the ambiguity of its subsequent reproduction and, moreover, perception. The "semantic constants" designated by the composer (these include, first of all, the notes of the author of the musical text concerning tempo, dynamics, strokes, character, etc.), on the one hand, carry a certain measure of freedom for the performer (the question of measure is quite debatable here, especially among performers, teachers, theorists; together at the same time, an amazing paradox catches the eye: the stricter — the more freedom). In fact, the author's notes form a semantic "framework", which must be retained in the process of interpretation so that the composer's work does not lose its author's (composer's) intention, becoming fully the creation of a performer who performs only himself.

Speaking about the complexity of analyzing the "life" of meaning in music, we must not forget that it is precisely the "participation" of many "elements" of the process of meaning-setting (both means of musical expression and extra-musical "conditions") that makes it possible to reveal the wealth of ways of "voicing" musical eidos.

It has already been mentioned that an exceptional role in the sound embodiment of musical meaning belongs to the performing skills and personality of the musician. Understanding performance practice as a manifestation of the uniqueness of the artist in a unique act of performance meets with a paradox: with the loss (to a certain extent) semantic stability, stability acquires semantic versatility, polyphony.

It is known that the very nature of music (procedural, temporal) implies constant dynamics, variability. Among other things, the banal requirement to "perform repetitive fragments in different ways" (from repetitive motifs and themes to reprise as part of a musical form) may be mentioned here. This need is dictated by the development of the material. But, at the same time, due to this technique, a kind of super-goal is achieved: movement in this case is revealed as a change in the musical fabric, in the sound of which musical thought, idea, image, hero, theme (depending on the genre) develops, and the performer himself, which can be represented or actually work on purely technical performance tasks (improving performance skills), or on an artistic image, or movement as a change that reaches the level of personal growth. The formation of professional skill in this case appears as a way of increasing the personality of the artist over the actual performance; performing art acts as an act of self-knowledge, self-creation ^{[30, pp. 156-165]}. "The creative act is immanently inherent only in the person, the personality as a free and independent power. Creativity can only be called that which is generated by an original substance that has the power of increasing power in the world. What is generated from the outside, what is created by the redistribution of substance, is not creativity. Creativity is not a new correlation of the parts of the world, creativity is an original act of the personal substances of the world" ^{[30, p. 165]}; ^[31]; ^[32]. Let's add: performing art as a super-goal and at the same time a form of philosophical reflection allows us to assume the presence of a living and mobile ideal essence of (musical) existence. Acting as a form of speculation, performance allows you to simultaneously "express" and "not express" something, because this something, being voiced, already becomes different.

The nature of music, therefore, appears as a unity of rigor of thought and inspiration ^{[5, p. 3]}. The combination of strict analyticism, discreteness (in high-altitude, temporal and other aspects of the musical fabric), consistency, rationality and a lively moment of sound, colored by the uniqueness of the personal musical principle, reveals an obvious facet of the nature of performing art: collected and at the same time free: "Let's remember any intonation of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin. In each of them, the presence of an immensely rich and deep content is intuitively felt, the whole world is rolled up in each of them, in each — the bottomlessness of the artist's holistic worldview, the worldview of the national culture that nurtured him, the worldview of the epoch ... Musicians think with such integral clusters of history and culture, building universes of artistic meaning" ^{[5, p. 5]}.

The universal in musical art is adjacent to the special, which in its own way is this universal. General musical "elements", such as pitch, rhythmic organization, harmonic structure, etc., inherent in music as such, being understood through the prism of cultural characteristics of the epoch, national school, ethnic identity, etc., represent (reveal) the distinctive features of these "elements" ^{[33, 34]}. Further, an essential aspect presupposes the unity of the already mentioned means of "building" musical fabric (sound, rhythm, harmony, etc.) and the moment of their "transformation" due to their connection with timbre, texture, stroke, tessitura, etc., which represents another opportunity for "reading" the meaning: the meaning of the context of the sound of the motif, intonation, phrases and so on.

The unique performing style of a musician (performing culture) as a way of giving musical meaning, it highlights the peculiarities of hearing, thinking, and understanding a particular artist. "Great music is the perfection of thought, and therefore we will find neither the indistinctness of syncresis (undifferentiated integrity), nor dry, beyond spiritual energies, analyticism, nor the bare rational structurality of synthesis, but they are all in friendly agreement, transformed, present at any moment of its sound. With its irreducible wholeness, music resembles rather not the linearly unfolding logic of verbal thought, but the multidimensional logic of being, at every second of the all-one" ^{[5, pp. 11-12]}. The palette of meanings, thus, of the musical text itself, and of each act of performance, capturing the momentary experience, living, "imagining" the composer, acquires an infinite variety of shades. Understanding the "meaning of music" is thus dynamic. "Harmony becomes intonational harmony, a ladointonal phenomenon, meter is not a dry beating of supports, but a living breath of accents, and composition is not a formal correctness in the sequence of sections, but poetry of unfolding meaning" ^{[5, p. 26]}. To clarify: an important aspect of meaning formation in the performing arts in general and in piano performance in particular is the nature of the extracted sound ("sparkling", "transparent", "velvet", "deaf", "dense", "heavy", etc.). The culture of sound in a broad sense in many ways shows a special performing a worldview transmitted by actual performing means (the same touch that demonstrates the peculiarities of hearing, thinking of a musician). It's no secret that a particularly sensitive, thinking listener in a concert hall notices how differently the same piece sounds performed by different artists. The special sound in each "special hands" is a truly valuable manifestation of genuine skill and scale of personality when the author's "performing handwriting" is "heard". The performer, as a "sound artist", in this case, becomes almost a co-author of the composer, truly creative with each of his performances, while representing the culture that brought him up with his own personality. The creative dialogue of personalities (composer — performer, performer — listener, composer — listener and, finally, composer — performer — listener) develops into a creative dialogue of cultures.

In this case, it is appropriate to note: from epoch to epoch, the feeling of metric, fret, harmonic, tempo and other aspects of music varies: for example, with regard to tempo, there are often considerations about the need for a modern performer to pay very close attention to the tempo instructions of composers, to reflect on how "moderate" Mozart felt Andante, which Bach wanted to say with the note "nicht zu geschwind" — "not too soon", taking into account quite "pragmatic" factors: from the device, say, a metronome designed for Ludwig van Beethoven by Johann Nepomuk Melzel ^[35], to the features of the technical device and characteristics of ancient instruments, for example, the specifics of the sound production of an ancient horsehair bow when playing strings from bull veins. What has been said illustrates the idea carried out earlier: in historical, regional, temporal and other features, the general is refracted in a unique way: shaping itself differently in the concrete, expanding the horizons of understanding, possibilities of interpretation, and as a result - defining the features of communication, similar to a multi—layered score of intertwining meanings.

The refraction of elements of national culture through the prism of the unique worldview of the creator (performer, composer) brings special, truly creative features to reflections on ways to reveal the essence of musical art — due to the uniqueness of the act of performance, the moment of "creation" of meaning always leaves the possibility of the presence of spontaneous, momentary, provided the simultaneous presence of already meaningful, conceptual, found, worked out in the process the creative work of a musician. At the same time, the presence of elements of national (for example, folklore material, characteristic rhythmics, melodies, intonation, style, etc.) is not always conscious, "prepared" by the author (in this case, the composer), it is often an intuitive sense of the flavor of tradition. As an example, one can cite the "Russianness" of Sergei Rachmaninoff's manner of musical utterance, when "one can only wonder at the kinship of the compositional logic of folk songwriters and Rachmaninoff, in whom the "proliferation" of melodic models occurs in almost the same way as in a long-drawn song. ... Surprisingly, the composer, starting not from the folklore prototype, but from the classical metrical and melodic-rhythmic structure, intuitively finds methods of development as close as possible to the national musical thinking expressed in the long-drawn song of the traditional layer" ^{[23, p. 28]}; ^{[23, p. 30]} or the "Frenchness" of Claude Debussy's creative handwriting, distinguished, according to the composer, by the "relaxed clarity" of the French national musical thinking ^{[34, p. 30]}. Such freedom allows you to flexibly and harmoniously combine different systems of worldview, represented by the "Russianness", "Frenchness" or "German" of artists, avoiding various kinds of "centrisms", but at the same time not losing local flavor. This approach is particularly significant in the problematic field of intercultural communication, where the possibilities of an original, national in a global context appear necessary in an attempt to build a dialogue in various ways, including by means of musical language ^[10]. It is valuable to have the opportunity to "speak out" and "be heard", and most importantly, to be "understood", the result of which can be not only the mutual enrichment of artistic systems, but also the harmonious coexistence of different cultures ready to "hear the voices" of dissimilar participants in an intercultural dialogue.

Conclusion

As a result of the undertaken research, the breadth of possible approaches to the problem of embodying musical meaning becomes obvious. The actual musical means of expression (sound, rhythm, timbre, texture, etc.) to some extent allow us to keep the "invariant in variations", but at the same time, their refraction in the prism of tradition, place, time, style, school, etc. expands the horizons of understanding and interpretation of this invariant. In addition, the uniqueness of the musician's personality and his unique performing skills is especially significant in the construction and comprehension of musical meaning. An artist (and a musician as well), being a carrier of culture, is a translator of the axiological, ideological attitudes of this culture. At the same time, he also presents his own unique personality traits in understanding and understanding the meaning: the meaning of creative activity, the meaning of reality in general. It seems that the artist's performing art, in this case, reveals the "author's" style of work with meaning as such in all the variety of ways it is given.

Anyway, the presented considerations regarding the means of building musical meaning seem far from exhausted, the depth and multidimensional nature of this problem open up the prospect for further research.