The symbolic lability of composition of instrumental ensemble under the transformations of musical thinking at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries
Authors: Zyma Liudmyla 
Published: January 2025

Statement of the problem. The colorful panorama of ensemble music of the last decades of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century is characterized by a variety of trends, artistic directions, genre- and style-creating, so a modern understanding of the ways of transformations of chamber ensemble art, resulting in its new qualitative specificity, seems to be in demand. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the study is to consider the genesis of new genre typological varieties of chamber instrumental music presented at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries and such a result of the transformations of musical thinking in the post-avant-garde and postmodern age as the variability of the indicators of ensemble composition. The named phenomenon became a landmark in the new ensemble music, but, having established itself in the modern musical consciousness, it has not yet acquired a clear phenomenological paradigm. The leading research method is analytical, in particular intonation analysis, with elements of comparative and cultural approaches, which take place in the works of Ukrainian and European musicologists. In order to trace the genesis of the emergence of new typological genre phenomena of chamber-ensemble music, examples are given from one-part piano quintets of mentioned chronological period by foreign and Ukrainian authors, in which, with a constant composition of the ensemble, there is a blurring and stratification of the instrumental sound field into symbolic “roles” – historically characteristic for “an image of the instrument” and others that arise as new sonorous formations in the avant-garde and post-avant-garde sound space and acquire their own symbolism, thanks to which the perception of the quantitative ensemble composition varies. Research results and conclusion. On the example of chamber and ensemble works – piano quintets by Polish composer Sigmund Krause, Ukrainian composer Aliona Tomlionova and others – the dramatically significant musical fragments and the symbolics of instrumental ensemble embodiment of its were analyzed. In all the analyzed works, with different musical languages, writing techniques, and dramaturgical constructions, we observe a symbolic lability of the quantitative and qualitative ensemble composition, which can be interpreted as a characteristic constant feature of ensemble music of the period under consideration. A significant expansion of its sound field is associated with a rethinking of the possibilities of the sound palette of instruments and, in connection with the latter, an expansion and multiplication in the perception of images and figurative roles available for the embodiment by each of them. The involvement of avant-garde techniques with their expansion of the playing areas of ensemble instruments, first of all the piano, but also strings, brass, and percussion, causes a transformation of the listener’s perception, which leads to an understanding of their “symbolic polyphony”, “multi-role” presence in the score of the sounding work, thereby leaving the actual quantitative composition of the ensemble in the background. The mentioned diverse experimentation with the ensemble composition, both quantitative and qualitative, can be considered an important feature of chamber music making of the modern era, in a certain way connected with the multiplicity of cultural meanings and ideas of the modern era.