Alla Zaghaikevych: message to Karol Shymanovsky
Authors: Zinkevych Olena 
Published: April 2023

Relevance of research connects with the need for an aesthetic assessment of electronic opus. For a long time, their analysis was carried out exclusively from the technological side (spectral analysis, creation of graphic scores, construction of models, exosemantic method, etc.) which led to the conclusion that for most professionals this sphere is still not so much music as technology. But Alfred Schnittke believed that technological analysis cannot reveal any piece of music, and it is more reasonable to analyze the piece according to its philosophical concept. It is significant that it was the works of Alla Zagaykevych that broke the inertia of the technological approach, forcing us to hear in electronic works their aesthetic component. And this is the result of the conscious position of the author, for whom the artistic task is in the foreground.

The purpose of the article is to reveal the artistic concept of one of the bright works of A. Zagaykevych "Mithe IV: K.S." (2011) for violin, electronic recording and real-time processing. This work was not considered in the musicological studies devoted to A. Zagaykevych. Comparative and historical research methods are used in the article.

The results and conclusions. Bright artifacts or meaningful programs with a changing, deformed picture of the world, with an avant-garde narrative strategy, where there is both a historical discourse and an intellectual dialogue with the listener, are often the primary creative impulse for Alla Zagaykevych. Such, for example, is her "Heroneia" (2002), which is based on Milorad Pavic’s book "The Inner Side of the Wind". Zagaykevych’s pieces inspired by the works of Oleg Lyshega, Mykhailo Semenko, Andri Chuzhy are a tribute to the memory of the outstanding artists. "Mithe IV: K.S." also fits into this series.

The title unambiguously refers to the famous cycle "Myths" by Karol Szymanowski. In the perception of A. Zagaykevych, "Myths" is a vivid collective expression of the style of K. Szymanowski. As material for her work, Zagaykevich uses fragments from various poems of Szymanovski's "Myths" (a table of borrowings is given in the article), but her "Mithe IV" does not break up into these fragments, but is perceived as a single musical whole. The reason is in the common properties of A. Zagaykevich's sensitively selected themes of "Fountain of Arethusa" and "Narcissus", which clearly reveal the affiliation of Szymanovski’s "Myths" to the Art of Secession.

The phonosphere of the central section of Mithe IV comes from another opus of Alla Zagaykevych - "Transparence" for violin, real-time processing and electronic recording (2006). A similar temporal metamorphosis is characteristic of the semantics of the myth. This section, in contrast to the previous one, is full of confusion. The intensification of anxious agitation also affects the "natural" texture layer created by electronics (at the beginning of the piece, it was formed by a sampler synthesis of bird chirping and the piano part of Szymanovski’s cycle). The acoustic flow generated by electronics grows, fills the entire sound space, thickens to the limit density, and hides all the instrumental "reliefs" under it. The acoustic flow generated by electronics grows, fills the entire sound space, thickens to the limit density, and hides all the instrumental "reliefs" under it. And through the thickness of this hypersound suddenly breaks through, as if from the depths of history, a barely audible echo of folk choral singing. It is based on samples of an authentic performance of the Ukrainian Kupala song, recorded during a folklore expedition near Tymoshivka. This collage inclusion is like a stroke of Szymanovski’s fate, a sign of his small homeland, like its image caused by the magic of art. A sense of historical stereoscopy arises, which, together with spatial stereoscopy, creates the effect of a hologram. When the sound-noise vortex dissipates, in the silence that has come (the electronics pause), the violin clearly "speaks" (in a low register) the melody of the song, the echo of which has just dissolved in space.

Within the parameters of the traditional genre system, the opus of A. Zagaykevych can be classified as one of the "high messages" that have developed in world poetry. Their features: a special "secret" content, the presence of an "ideal interlocutor", who becomes the alter ego of the author of the message, the recognizability of the addressee. A. Pushkin's elegy "To Ovid" appears to be a typological analogue to Alla Zagaikevych's message. Among their commonalities determined by the genre: "traces" of a biographical description, the creation of a portrait of the addressee, temporal polyphony (counterpoint of the times of the author and the addressee), comparison of their linguistic elements (through the citation of the addressee). The analogy between the two Epistles is strengthened by the common tragic zigzag in the fates of the great Roman and the outstanding Polish composer: exile (this is how Karol Szymanowski perceived his separation from Ukraine). Ovid is also present in the opus of A. Zagaykevych - as an "unmanifested", mirage character, connecting a series of transformations, which is completed by "Mithe IV: K.S.": ancient myths — Ovid's "Metamorphoses" — Szymanovski’s "Myths" — "Mithe IV: K.S."