“Vocal style” in Western European and Chinese art history: a comparative analysis
Authors: Zhou Yi. 
Published: March 2021

Background. The category of style is one of the most used in modern musicology. This is due to objective reasons: the attention of the “consumer” of a cultural product is mostly not focused on its author recently. The coexistence of individual performance versions of composer’s works is one of the reasons that problems of stylistic attribution of musical art do not lose their relevance. In different areas of musical practice these problems are interpreted in different ways and get various degrees of theoretical understanding. The area of vocal art deserves special attention. An analysis of specialized literature suggests that the ever-increasing number of appropriate studies has not yet influenced the crystallization of the definition of “vocal style” in the scientific sense. This is due to the fact that the meaning of the term “vocal style” has many dimensions that reflect technological, aesthetic, historical, individual and national parameters of creativity. This resulted in the purpose of proposed article – to identify the singular and general in the interpretation of the category “vocal style” in Western European and Chinese art discourse. The research methodology is determined by its objectives; it is integrative and based on a combination of general scientific approaches and musicological methods. The leading research methods are historical, genre-stylistic and interpretative analyzes. Results. The word style first appeared in ancient Greece, where it was called a tool for writing on wooden tablets covered with wax. Later, the word style began to be used to describe not only human activity, but himself. At the same time, there is no case in Confucius’s “Analects” of using this definition. Central to the aesthetic block of Confucius’ teaching is not the question of the style of art, but the degree of influence that it has on the formation of the five moral qualities. As for questions directly about the style of artistic creation, Chinese scholars believe that they were first addressed by a contemporary and follower of Confucius, literary theorist Liu Xie, in whose works for the first time in the history of Chinese culture the word “style” was used. We note that in both Europe and China the studies of ancient thinkers have become the foundation for centuries and millennia that determined the essential parameters of the worldview of peoples and civilizations and stimulated the development of human thought. So nowadays style is similarly understood as a certain set of features that characterize either a particular person or the results of his activities. As for a narrower understanding of style (in our case – vocal style), it historically developed much later, which was preceded by a long evolution of vocal art and the accumulation of relevant scientific works. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the specific of vocal performance, the essence of which involves working with verbal texts, their artistic representation, and, consequently, the determinism of not only musical but also artistic embodiment of the work. Thus, in European treatises of Renaissance and Baroque periods it is not about the performer, but about the style of specific musical works, basic parameters of which are determined by the place of performance and the appropriate type of expression. At the same time, there are studies which examine the national aspect of the phenomenon of vocal performance, that is perceived as a consequence of the interaction of several factors: temperament, climate and landscape. It is interesting that even in the baroque treatises maxims about the advantages of the Italian school bel canto can be found; and nowadays it continues to determine the development of not only European but also world vocal art. We emphasize that we can not find Chinese treatises dating from the XVII–XVIII centuries, which are devoted to the comprehension of vocal art in the European sense of the word. After all, academic vocal culture in this country has begun to develop only in the early twentieth century and therefore imitated and appropriated the aesthetic and technology of the dominant European vocal style bel canto. It is known that the definition of bel canto is most often used in two cases: as a designation of a certain historical style, which is most vividly embodied in works of V. Bellini and G. Donizetti, and as a designation of singing technique. So we see that, as in other performing arts, the definition of style contains two interdependent parameters: technological and artistic and aesthetic. And the latter in the case of exactly vocal schools can be interpreted as a mobile factor. The similarity of interpretation of the definition of vocal style (namely one of its varieties – bel canto) in European and Chinese art literature is the result of the fact that eastern and western cultures are gradually approaching each other in the process of historical development. Conclusions. A comparative analysis of European and Chinese scientific sources suggests that the issues of musical stylistics occupied an important place in the minds of thinkers even before our era. And although both in the East and in the West the category of style was perceived as a mean of realization of the individual worldview of the man-creator, we can still talk about the difference in vectors of study of this problem. For example, if in the East it was perceived as a fundamental part of the ethical, in the West – the aesthetic. The formation of the phenomenon of “vocal style” was a natural consequence of the development of European vocal culture, where concepts of “technique” and “style” gradually crystallized. They became the basis of European vocal art, the assimilation of which has led to the phenomenal success of the modern Chinese school bel canto.