Actualization of folklore prototype images in the philosophical concept of Yurii Alzhniev’s Song Symphony “Behind the Milky Way...”
Authors: Osypenko Viktoriia 
Published: July 2024

Statement of the problem. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The experience of studying the archetypes of the culture of Slobozhanshchyna region is offered, through the understanding of their role in the conception of the recent composition by contemporary Ukrainian artist Yuriy Alzhniev. Specific examples of borrowing samples of folk songs from Slobozhanshchyna (the ballad “How a grey eagle competed with a grey horse” from the repertoire of kobzars; the chumak song “Hey, our chumaks were on their way”, the allegorical song “Oh, woe to that seagull”) reveal value and meaning orientations of the artist with the aim of prolonging “historical memory” in the most recent history of music. In this sense, Slobidska Ukraine has historical, stylistic and genre priorities fixed in the folk song tradition, which has never been interrupted (even during the Soviet statehood). This is evidenced by the funds of folklore laboratories of higher educational establishments (in particular, Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts, and the House of Folk Art). The heart of the interaction of the folk song tradition and academic music is Slobozhanshchyna singing, which is a vast genre-stylistic system. Therefore, musicologists should generalize the conceptual foundations of the creative work of those artists who continue the Slobozhanshchyna tradition. Yuriy Alzhniev occupies an honourable place among them. His resent symphony belongs to the “Slobozhanshchyna text”. The latter is a term of musical regional science, which means a collective product of folk art continuing its existence in the creative work of modern composers of Eastern Ukraine. Thus, we are talking about the actualization of Slobozhanshchyna folklore in the symphonic genre. Despite precise instructions regarding which folkloric sources (chants, genres) the composer used to build the original concept of the Symphony (Osadcha, 2019; Kliuka, 2023), in our opinion, the folkloric layer of his dramaturgy still remained undervalued by musicologists. The specifics of Yu. Alzhniev’s composition determined our research methods: the historiographic one is addressed to the genres of the folk song tradition; the intonation one allows to highlight the linguistic and stylistic polylogue of the folk song and the artist’s symphonic thinking; and the comparative one reveals the kinship and differences of folklore sources in the context of their composer interpretation. Research results. Folkloric images in the Song Symphony have a poetic-verbal and purely musical origin. So, in the examples of Ukrainian calendar-ritual poetry, eagles plow the land and carry water. In the Slobozhanshchyna region version of the folk ballad used by the composer the eagle’s wings are a symbol of spiritual flight, heavenly destination, and the strength of the horse’s legs is a symbol of life forces, endurance, and earthly way.The central in the composition ones are: the folkloric motives of fraternity in the journeys in search of happiness, a mandate to take care of small children; the symbol of Milky Way as a God’s Path, the heavenly route of birds and human souls. The latter symbol is revealed by one of the brightest genres of the folk song tradition of Sloboda Ukraine – the chumak songs, unique in the world folklore the songs of the strangers in their journeys. Among many, the composer chosen the song “Hey, our chumaks were on their way” for the key image of the third (choral) movement of the Symphony. The symbolism of the folkloric archetype of the road got a double code: the road as the destiny of every Ukrainian; the Milky Way (called “Chumak Way” in the Ukrainian folklore) as a symbol of national culture, which connects the historical path of Ukraine and the personal destiny of the Cultural Hero of the Symphony to Truth, Divine Light. It is no accident that the author refers to the song “Oh, woe to that seagull”, which became a symbol of the historical fate of Ukraine, the search by folk singers for nationality, self-identity. This song is consonant with chumak ones and folk ballads based on the motif of the care of little children while the father is looking for his fortune in a foreign land. Expressive singing contains a formula that in the Symphony performs the function of the author’s monogram, combining the thematic structure of all the movements of the Symphony. The values of traditional culture are a source of Yurii Alzhniev’s creativity. The idea of consonance, on which the Symphony’s conception based, means the special state of a human in unity with the nature. The musical folk intonation of “sub-fourth” (ascending fourth + descending second) serves as the “code” to understanding “consonance”, connection of the Ancient and Present. The composer widely uses semitone-free scales, notes the power of their influence in folk songs. For him, it is a sign of inviolability, globality, infinity of the unknown, “invisible world” (according to H. Skovoroda). The semitone-free movement of the rising chorus of the ballad (“And he argued, competed...”) gives a sense of the immensity of the space in which the heroes of folk poetry exist, as the personification of the heavenly and earthly purpose of life. The iconic nature of the genre, determined by its functionality, is consciously modelled by the composer in order to create a nationally defined musical and linguistic picture of the world. Conclusion. Yu. Alzhniev’s Song Symphony musical-philosophical conception gravitates to that spiritual tradition, in which a human is considered as the embodiment of the nation, and the art is considered as the platform for the synthesis of folkloric archetypes and individual composer creativity. The indicated signs of the folk song tradition, crystallized in the thousand-year evolutional move by steps of typifying (intonation-genre and figurative), with their natural energy, which awakes the subconscious, nourish the semantics of the author’s language. The complex of intonation signs operating at the level of genetic memory represents the archetype of “primary intonation” for the composer.