The compositional-dramaturgic peculiarities of Symphony No 3: ‘Eschatophony’ by Valentyn Silvestrov
The aim of the paper is to ground the role of V. Silvestrov’s ‘Eschatophony’ within the frames of the historical-stylistic genesis of the Ukrainian symphony genre of the latter half of the 20th century by means of detecting its compositional-dramaturgic peculiarities. It is necessary to analyse the Third Symphony in order to clear up the nature of a drastic transformation of the genre invariant occurred in it, which reflected the author’s ontological concept. A consistent consideration of the mechanisms of the musical material organisation, the notation of musical scores, and structural peculiarities help to understand the image world of V. Silvestrov’s music. Research methodology is based on both the historical-typological, systematic, and genre methods and on the structural-functional analysis and the onto-semantic approach. Results. The Third Symphony continues the development of the successive realisation of V. Silvestrov’s avant-garde composer’s thinking. Along with already written symphonies such as ‘Spectra’, ‘Meditation’, and ‘Drama’, it belongs to the early period of his creativity. Guided by the programme, the author states that the ‘Eschatophony’ actualizes a philosophical discourse of time as a basic category of a man’s being. In contrast to the Second Symphony, where a category of space is realised as a sounding reality, ‘Eschatophony’ ascends to the historical consciousness and assumes allusions to eschatology. At that, it raises up a fundamental for the 20th century philosophy matter about a perception of time, its linear model and finiteness of history. In the Third Symphony, by means of the dichotomy ‘being– man’, the composer interprets the universe through the history and realises it as a contrast to the universe as nature. Three parts of ‘Eschatophony’ make an appeal to a language, logos, and are structured by the composer in the alphabetical order. A consistently realised Latin alphabet (alike to numbers in a classic music score) serves as a uniting structural principle as the composer uses two systems in the Symphony, namely a traditional and avantgarde (aleatoric-sonorant) ways to record a music text. V. Silvestrov also applied the ‘polyphony of the systems’ principle in his ‘Meditation’ for cello and chamber orchestra. In contrast to ‘Meditation’ where the purpose of the musical dramaturgy was to bring the systems to a certain unity, the Third Symphony shows a division and moving away from the equality of these unlike systems. The timbre dramaturgy plays an important role in the music composition. Bells and percussion are interpreted as a symbol of time (a mechanical rate of clock, a chime of bells and commemorative chime conveying vanity and frailty of human history). ‘Eschatophony’ is a manifest of the major ontological principles of V. Silvestrov’s writing style. This refers to the philosophy of a sound, the immanent relation ‘the natural-the cultural’ (natura-cultura) as significant aspects in understanding of a musical sound. The etymological analysis serves as a key and helps to comprehend the matter of finiteness of a sound (taking into account the factor of historism as a method to comprehend being), as well as to realise the composer’s creativity. The discourse of ‘silence’, experiments with the transition of a musical sound into noises and rustle, a careful listening to the birth of a sound out of silence, treating a sound as a phenomenon – this is the philosophy of a sound in ‘Eschatophony’ by V. Silvestrov. The elegiac mode of statement, applying to such genres as post-music, post-symphony, post-lude, and epitaph are genetically incorporated into the concept of the large-scale ‘apocalypse’ of a sound in the Third Symphony. The study is novel as it reveals new possibilities in interpreting of the historical-stylistic genesis of the Ukrainian symphony and symphonism of the latter half of the 20th century using V. Silvestrov’s early creativity as an example. The analysis of the compositional-dramaturgic peculiarities of V. Silvestrov’s Third Symphony within the philosophy of a sound has been carried out for the first time. The concept of the Symphony represents historism as a consciousness type (homo historicus) and a category of time as a basic one. The given analysis of ‘Eschatophony’ shows a transformation of the genre of the Ukrainian symphony in the mentioned period realised by means of the change in the vision of the ontological distance ‘man – being’. Practical significance. The research results help to comprehend the deep processes of the development of Ukrainian symphonic music on its modern stage. They testify overcoming and transformation of the genre invariant of a symphony. The compositional-dramaturgic analysis which has been carried out, reveals a new vision of the scientific comprehension of both the avant-garde period of V. Silvestrov’s creativity and the evolution of the composer’s symphonic creativity in general. It testifies the change of the paradigm and reconsideration of the historical-typological principles in symphonism in Ukrainian music of the 20th - 21st centuries.