THE UKRAINIAN KOBZA AND BANDURA IN ORGANOLOGISTS’ WORKS OF THE SECOND HALF XX – EARLY XXI CENTURIES

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Bandurais considered in organology to be the most debatable instrument of the traditional music culture of the Ukrainians. The issues of its origins are being actively discussed in modern scientific discourse. The representatives of traditional Slavic organology, Mykola Lysenko, Aleksandr Famintsyn, and Hnat Khotkevych, made significant contributions to its study, and found that kobza and bandura were two different instruments. These scientists have shown that there were two types of bandura in the Ukrainian traditional instruments: with prystrunki (short melodic strings) and without. H. Khotkevych refuted the Famintsyn’s hypothesis about the Western European origin of the bandura and the eastern, Asian origin of kobza. He made an assumption about autochthonous origin of the bandura, without confirming it with scientific arguments, which, ultimetaly, corresponded to the general state of organology development in 1920s in the territory of the USSR. The author attempts in her article to analyze kobza and bandura functioning in the works of Ukrainian and Russian organologists of the second half of 20th and the beginning of 21 centuries – A. Humeniuk, К. Vertkov, M. Khai, M. Prokopenko, L. Cherkaskyi, V. Kushpet, as well as individual bandura players. Kobza or bandura in Andrii Humeniuk’s concept. The famous Ukrainian organologist A. Humeniuk examines kobza (or bandura) in his monograph “Ukrainian Folk Musical Instruments” (1967), assigning them to the strings on which the sound was produced by a pinch 1 . The author, in the historical reference on these instruments origin, development and existence, treats kobza and bandura as a single instrument (in the traditions of Ukrainian traditional organology). The organologist, when giving an assessment of the two controversial theories of these instruments origin – the migratory theory by A. Famintsyn and the autochthonous theory by H. Khotkevych – indicates the bias and one-sidedness of each of them, since “the first <...> did not take into account the folk’s creative initiative