Typology of musical forms as a method of cognitive modeling
Authors:   University of Qingdao, Liu Lian 
Published: February 2023

The common place of cognitive understanding of music of the past twentieth century as a holistic musical and artistic system was not so much the birth of writing techniques, but their mixing, interaction, obvious synthesis, perceived integrally and organically, but very difficult to find in analysis. In the twentieth century, a change in the creative process led to the rebirth of a traditional musical form as a structure and the birth of a new type of musical composition. Taking into account the fact that the term “musical form” does not embrace all the facets of the holistic meaning of music that exist in contemporary composers' creativity, this article introduces its homonym - “musical composition”. Thus, we affirm the right of the term “composition” to act as a musical universal for its description as a demonstrator of the artistic consciousness of the composer and, accordingly, the category of comprehending the spiritual content of a musical work. By composition we will understand the structural principles of organizing a musical work as an artistic whole in the unity of musical time and space. We are talking about the stable qualities of the procedural formation of music, its architectonics (Space = architectonics) and the mobile properties of musical development (Time = intonational dramaturgy). The analytical musicology of the twentieth century has developed the criteria necessary to form the basis of the typology of musical forms of classic-romantic music. A large treasure was introduced by Russian and Ukrainian musicologists: B. Asafiev, V. Bobrovsky, V. Medushevsky, V. Kholopova, Y. Kholopov, T. Kureregian, V. Zaderatsky, etc. On the interaction of functional and historical-genre approaches, a cognitive method of analyzing contemporary composition in Chinese music of the twentieth century is built, aimed at comprehending national specificity as a culture of assimilated musical thinking. The article gave a number of examples on the “13 Preludes and Fugues” polyphonic cycle by Chen Mingzhi, a kind of Chinese “Ludus tonalis”. The analysis carried out in this article showed the ability of a musician to master the Eastern tradition of the highest form of Western European polyphony - fugues. On the conclusions we can say the following: 1. Musical forms of the twentieth century. so individualized that they need to be systematized according to a single functional and thematic criterion. The systematics of forms is directly dependent on the structural complication in three ways, starting from the category of the topic; the content of specific classes of musical forms, as well as their interposition, is partially changed. 2. In the works of Chinese composers of the twentieth century, whose works form the basis of teaching the course “analysis of musical works” in the university system of China, the principle of “renewal of typical structures” prevails. The assimilation of the typological foundations of musical composition and the integration of innovative ideas in the national in-tonational soil - this is the modern life of the historical and stylistic systematics of musical forms in Chinese music of the academic tradition. A new understanding of the form as a composition does not restrict its understanding (as it may seem at first glance), but, on the contrary, includes all the historically established factors of the organization of the whole, both traditional (vertical, horizontal) and the newest (atonality, series, structure polyphony of layers). This was demonstrated by the analysis of the Chen Mingzhi polyphonic cycle “13 preludes and fugues”. 3. The criterion for the study of the latest (including Chinese) music of the twentieth century in the mirror of classical typology is the value of nationally original forms of musical thinking (thematic, harmonic, texture-timbre, structural). At the same time, the general laws of the functional logic of the created musical composition in the unity of space-time parameters became the norm of artistic typology in music for Chinese composers and performers.