The vocal cycle “Facelia”: the experience of “sound existence” in Sofia Gubaidulina’s early creativity
Authors: Klebanova S.V. 
Published: December 2019

The basis for the topic. S. Gubaidulina’s appeal to the poem “Phacelia” by M. Prishvin in 1956 was not accidental. Literary scholars interpret this work as an example of lyrical and philosophical prose of the middle of the 20th century. The composer’s perception of the “break” of the two worlds – “macrocosm” (the nature) and “microcosm” (subjective illusions and human hopes) developed organically and immediately that was reflected in the early vocal cycle called “Phacelia”. For her, the musical and sound symbolism turned out to be consonant with the philosophy of a human’s “inclusion” into the nature, merging with it: the middle parts of the vocal cycle (3–5) are imbued with this idea. The method of comparing two figurative spheres as an existential problem was intensively discussing in the work of not only composers, but also writers of the generation of the 60s of the 20th century, and this discourse stays an actual today. The object of this study is S. Gubaidulina’s vocal cycle “Phacelia” (based on the literary work by M. Prishvin) as a reflection of the philosophy of existentialism in the music of the 60s of the 20th century; the subject is a genre-semantic analysis of the composer concept of the cycle as “sound existence” – the characteristic feature of the early vocal style of S. Gubaidulina. The vocal cycle “Phacelia” is among the discoveries made by the young S. Gubaidulina, which are least discussed in musicology. Hovewer, the composer repeatedly emphasized the absence of a radical transformation, a “breakdown” of style in her creative work: “From the very beginning I go along approximately the same path What I am creating now is approximately the same to what I created when I was young. I wrote then the composition called “Phacelia”, and now everything is about the same.” (Gubaidulina, as cited in Munipov, 2016). The purpose of the article is to consider the concept of this vocal cycle in terms of understanding the artistic tasks of the performing embodiment of the early style of S. Gubaidulina (the Kharkov premiere of this work was held in 2012 in the National University of Arts named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky, in performing by the author of this article as pianist together with soprano Marina Chernoshtan). The methodological basis of the work is the theory of expression parameters by V. Kholopova (1999, p. 155), from which the genre-semantic and stylistic analysis of the work of S. Gubaidulina proposed in the article is pushed. The presentation of the main material. As the analysis demonstrated, the binary nature determines the structure and dramaturgy of the cycle, organizes its semantic space at two levels: the philosophical concept of the composition and the sound-like semantics of the musical language. The essence of the principle of binary opposition in the analysed vocal cycle is to create a set of musical expression means, the semantics of which is fixed as an “expression parameter” and stably characterize one of the two semantic fields of dramaturgy of the vocal cycle: Macrocosm and Microcosm. The main methods of the sound existence of literary images are revealed: the genre-style re-semantization, the creation of the author’s musical lexemes; the tonal-harmonic openness of structures; the polymodality; the combination of the principles of end-to-end, parallel and editing dramaturgy; the stratification of time when showing two plans of the being of the consciousness of a hero. The features of the manifestation of binary oppositions from the point of view of means of expression have been considered: melos, meter and rhythm, texture, articulation, which is very important for the performers of this complex composition. According to existential philosophy, the path of a human is an emotional experience and existential truth must be experienced. Therefore, the “directorial dramaturgy” by S. Gubaidulina creates its own configuration of meanings as the existential answer of the author: – the distance of “I” from the external world, memories (the 1–2 parts of the cycle: tension, despair); – the “contact” of “I” with Macroworld, its involvement in the Microcosm (the 3–5 parts: contemplation, enthusiasm, surprise); – the rethinking of the existential experience of “I” (the 6 part: humility, anxiety, followed by insight). On the whole, the idea of the duality of the being in the consciousness of a suffering person is embodied in music by S. Gubaidulina as a binary system that goes back to the foundations of existential philosophy. Hence the choice of parallel dramaturgy, which is associated with the re-creation of different time layers in music (lasting time, present time, accomplished time, time elapsed from the position of the present). Conclusions. Based on the results of the genre-semantic analysis of the vocal cycle, the conclusions are drawn about the nature of the early style, the principles of the dramatic organization of the artistic whole, and the sound symbolism of the instrumental accompaniment. “Phacelia” is one of the brightest examples of the composer “stage directing” of primary text as the experience of translating a literary work into a sound symbolic form. In it, the composer’s early-style methods were formed (binariness, creation of author’s lexemes, genre-style re-semantization, tonal-harmonic openness of individual structures, sound symbolism, and the sound depiction elements), which will go through as end-to-end ones into her later compositions.