Musical and instrumental culture of Ukrainians as a component of the formation of national outlook
Authors: Khai Mykhailo 
Published: January 2021

Background. One of the integrating, determining and identifying forces of the social progress of the entire human community is the custom and folklore tradition of the smallest sub-ethnic units / constituents individual nations and peoples, their verbal and ethno-cultural (including ethno-musical) sources, that, like rivers and brooks, fill the ocean of culture promoting for life and further development. The structure of the traditional Ukrainian musical culture, along with the well-known the old practices of group singing, itinerant kobzars and lira players, also consists of a powerful musical-instrumental component (herdsman’s folklore, calendarian-ritual chanting and dance). The aim and methods of the research. This article examines the phenomenon of traditional instrumentalism from the point of view of its fundamental influences on the worldviews regarding the formation and functioning of the ethnic sound of Ukrainians based on the longtime field-type, theoretical, pedagogical and practical (scientific and reconstructive musical performing) the experience of the author. The research results. Especially effective and such that, in recent years, was involved in the processes of salvation and “strengthening” (the term by S. Hrytsa) of traditional musical aesthetics, is the method of scientific and executive reconstruction of old folk music genres and forms. Systematic scientific-theoretical and structural-typological analytical work aimed at reproducing prototypes and structural details of reconstructed objects, forms, genres and actions of traditional Ukrainian musical culture, including instrumental, was reflected primarily in the research of S. Hrytsa (2000; 2002; 2015), A. Ivanytskyi (2007), I. Matsiievskyi (2012), B. Kindratiuk (2012), V. Yarmola (2014) and the author of these lines (Khai, M., 2011a; 2011b; 2013 and others). The author of the article thoroughly considers special issues of indexing musical instruments according to the system of E. Hornbostl – K. Sachs with the principle of division into classes, subclasses, categories, subdivisions; for the first time in Ukrainian ethnoorganology he carrys out a complete and consistent grouping of Ukrainian folk musical instruments. It is stated that the most important criteria of all classifications are: form, construction, structure, way of playing, repertoire, manner of performance. The criteria of traditionalism and functioning of folk instruments are determined separately (see: Khai, M., 2011a: 145–261). Based on this, Ukrainian folk musical instruments are considered in the following groups: 1) folk idiophones (self-sounding), 2) folk membranophones; 3) folk chordophones (strings); 4) folk aerophones (wind). Analyzing the existing classifications of national instrumental music, the author puts forward the thesis: areas of distribution and “density of ingrowth” of non-ethnic and authorial elements in the traditional centers of Ukrainian national instrumental music are mostly related to factors of geographical proximity, of natural extinction and administrative-repressive planting of alluvial and so-called “parallel” culture. Experiments on the instrumental traditions of Ukrainians, along with the autochthonous traditional instrumental repertoire, testify to the active functioning at the level of reception / ingrowth of works of other national origin. The interethnic and inter-genre transformation of the folk-instrumental style is connected with the spread of the Moscow, Polish, Romanian and Jewish intonation elements on the territory of the country. Touching the extremely complex and topical problems of archetypal traditional culture, interethnic relations of nations in the modern kaleidoscope of globalization processes, the article focuses on the negative (forced, administrative-aggressive absorption and destruction) and the positive (diversity, enrichment) interactions of the mentioned cultural elements. Characterizing from the positions mentioned here the main features of the ethnic sound ideal in the instrumental tradition of Ukrainians, the author defends its “European model” (tendency to cantilena sound of violin and flute ) as opposed to the type, which dominates the ethnosonic aesthetics of East – tremolo on one string. For the first time in these studies, the thesis is asserted that sounds that imitate the human voice or complement it predominate in Ukraine: flute cantilena, bandura-kobza and partly cymbal arpeggio, which differ significantly and fundamentally from the “Asian” coloristics of one-string tremolo. Conclusions. The final outcome of the study, about the cathartic function of traditional instrumentalism and musical culture in modern social-sublimation processes of human development and, conversely – about neglecting it as a manner to the complete destruction of human civilization as such, steers away from pessimism, inspiring hope for survival in the cataclysms of nature and society as a whole.