The genre of folk song settings: the ways of interaction of traditional and professional musical art
Authors: Zhang Ling 
Published: March 2021

Logical reason for research. The contemporary music science is becoming an increasingly multifaceted research field. This is connected with the evolution of musical art in general (its language, genre system, stylistic diversity), and its interaction with other manifestations of human creativity, and with new aspects of studying the achievements of world and national culture. One of the topical perspectives of scientific attention over the past decades has been the attention of musicologists to musical practice, in particular, to musical performance in all its multi-vector manifestations – in its genesis, historical retrospective and general cultural, civilizational context, in its syncretic unity with the composing creativity, in its palette of forms and genres of musical practice, in the traditions and perspectives in musical science and the existence in modern cultural conditions. Innovation. The presented article is devoted to the genre of folk song settings in the aspect of the specifics of the ways of interaction between traditional and professional musical art. By traditional we mean folk musical creativity of an oral nature, of “collective” authorship, and by professional – academic musical art of a composing, author’s nature (both types of musical creativity in the European culture). Each of these types of creativity has its own specificity in the primary source – the genre, style, figurative, linguistic, performing one, and the ways of interaction at these basic levels affect both the genre of folk song settings and its stage presentation. In the theoretical aspect, the genre of folk song settings is the result of a synthesis of composing and performing interpretation, and in the performing aspect, in fact, an interpretation of interpretation, which determines new perspectives of its study. Objectives. The purpose of this research is to characterize the ways of interaction between traditional and professional musical art on the example of the genre of setting a folk song in genre-style and performing aspects. Methods. The main methods of the presented research are the genre one and the performing one. The genre method is necessary both for characterizing the basic constants of the folk song settings genre, especially those related to the synthesis of traditional and professional musical art, and for identifying the specifics of this genre in the performing aspect. The performing method makes it possible to identify those features of the genre of folk song settings that are associated with its performing specificity as one of the most important areas of manifestation of the above-mentioned synthesis. Results and Discussion. One of the burning thematic areas of modern musicology is vocal music, its genre, style and performing specifics. It is related to the issues of the interaction of words and music, the methods of expressiveness, the stage presentation and the interpretation of vocal compositions, in particular, taking into account the specifics of style and genre through the prism of modern concert practice. This also applies to the genre of folk song settings, which is representing the traditions of both folk and professional music, with which this research is connected. The synthetic genre nature of folk song settings, which has been preserved in the process of the historical development of the genre and is based on the interpretation of the composing and performing character as the main genre indicator, increases the degree of relevance of the scientific research of this genre phenomenon both in theoretical and practical aspects, with a projection on the needs of the composing and performing art in the modern cultural conditions. The problem of an adequate reflection of the intonation and figurative content of the original folk source in the genre of folk song settings has always been the focus of attention of both folklorists, who collected samples of folk song creativity, and composers – authors of the settings of folk songs, and researchers of musical art. The ways of interaction between traditional and professional musical creativity pass through the main levels of a musical composition, which are always interconnected and represent a complex living organism, where changes in one segment can affect all the others. We are talking about genre-style, figurative, linguistic (intonation) and performing aspects. The latter should be emphasized separately, since in the field of the traditional, folk musical creativity, the performing presentation is a syncretic component, and this applies to any type of folk art. In professional musical art, where authorship (historically, first the composing one, and then the performing one) became a separate component, the performing aspect acquires a special meaning and its own specific tasks, and this way of interaction between traditional and professional musical art is the field where there happens the actualization of one or another quality (from one or another component of the above-mentioned synthesis) of the performed composition in the genre of folk song settings. Conclusions. The genre of folk song settings by its origin is associated with several levels of specificity – the figurative and artistic, linguistic, genre, style, and performing one. All these levels in this genre represent two types of musical art, the interaction of which allowed the genre of folk song settings to appear – the traditional (folk, collective) musical creativity and the professional (author’s) musical art (in particular, that of the European tradition). The peculiarities of the interaction of these two musical worlds in the genre of folk song settings represent different ways, and they are all connected with each other, which gives rise to new perspectives – the composing, performing, and research ones. The possibilities for the further research in the direction which is fixed in the topic of the presented article are associated with the characteristic of the synthetic genre nature of the settings of a folk song. Combining the features of traditional musical art (as the music of the oral tradition) and the patterns of professional musical art (as the author’s musical creativity with a fixed recording), the settings of a folk song offers the composer, the performer, the listener, and the musicologist a number of special tasks that can be solved in the special conditions of accounting the above-mentioned specificity of the genre of folk song settings, which is the composing and performing interpretation of the original folklore source.