Matrix structures of virtual in the system of musical notation
The concept “virtual” is widespread in contemporary musicology – both domestic and foreign. The musical science works of recent years, in which one way or another applied the concept of virtual, belong to the most diverse spheres of music science, cover a wide variety of topics: the problems of electronic music, of contenporary composers’ creativity, ontology of musical composition, musical communication, theoretical problems of a genre. Virtual in the musicological discourse is defined as: hidden, obscured, removed, computer reality, illusion created by technical means, possible, potential, secondary, less significant in the structure of the whole, abstract, imaginary, conditional artistic world, actual. As we can see, the concept of virtual is in the process of forming an established semantic structure and needs in scientific development as a purely musicological problem. In our opinion, its content can be organized as a conceptual system with three elements: virtual ontological (connected with the way of being a musical work, when it does not sound), virtual technological (computer music practices), virtual cognitive – the scope of hidden possibilities of musical text. One of the principles, on which the virtual cognitive research strategy is based, is the problem of notation, the notion of a priori incompleteness of the note recording, which causes a permanent difference between the recorded and the sounded. That is, any system of notation is invariant underlying, on which the almost infinite range of possibilities of performing intonation arises and is realized – in fact, the sphere of virtual. At the same time, it should be noted that the various historical types of notation were not studied by musicologists in the perspective of the problem of virtual in music. The purpose of the research is to identify the matrix structures of the virtual in the system of musical notation, to comprehend the process of development the latter from the standpoint of the problem of musical virtual, to identify the actual and virtual parameters of the notation at different stages of its development. The following methods are used in this paper: analytical, comparative-historical and structural-systematic. Exposition of the main material of the study. Any musical text due to its incompleteness is a matrix structure of the virtual, any system of notation includes actual and virtual parameters. As the actual parameters we understand everything that is sufficiently complete and accurately displayed in the notation and therefore can be reproduced quite clearly by the performer (specific physical properties of sound, performances, etc.). Virtual ones are those parameters that are not reflected in the musical text, or they displayed partially and therefore are in the field of possible. The sound embodiment of such parameters is always characterized by instability and variation. Virtual parameters of the notation are part of the composer’s style and demonstrate a thesaurus of one or another era. In classical five-line notation the actual parameters are sound altitude, meter and rhythm, tempo, dynamics, articulation, ornamentation (not always), and the virtual parameters there are harmonic vertical, texture (in the practice of general bass, partimento tradition), tempo, microdynamics, articulation, agogy, ornamentation, other nuances of performance. In the notations of the earlier eras, the virtual area was even wider. In the literal notation it was a rhythm, in the neumatic notation – the exact height of sound and rhythm, in the modal and mezural notations – the exact duration of each separated sound. In the scores of the XXth–XXIth centuries, any of the parameters of the notation may become actual or virtual. In some varieties of nondeterministic notation, the very structure of a musical composition becomes virtual or even music as a sound phenomenon, because some of scores written in a graphical notation no longer require sound embodiment. The results of the research support the idea that they can be used in educational programs, in the methodology of historical and theoretical musicology. Conclusions. Virtual of the music notation is a part of the sphere of virtual cognitive, connected directly with the musical text and represents a field of possibilities, limited by the threshold of perception of sound – the material of composer’s work, on the one hand, and by the stylistic features of a certain era, on the other. At the historical stages of the development of musical notation preceding the Classical-Romantic epoch, the ratio of the latter changed in the direction of reducing the number of virtual parameters, which allows to imagine the development of a musical score writing in this period as the process of actualization of virtual. In classical five-line clock notation, the balance between actual and virtual parameters has been achieved which is again violated in the systems of avant-garde music. Prospects for further researchs we see in a more detailed consideration in the chosen perspective of each stage of development of musical notation. The great interest, in particually, lies in the study of experimental, innovative works of the composers of the XX–XXI centuries.