Synergism of Music and Word in Polyphonic Forms of Choral Works a Cappella by Modern Russian Composers

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of a polyphonic choral composition as a polycode text, in which literary and musical texts as paralinguistic means contain heterogeneous information and add additional shades to the content of the score, i.e., the musical text as a whole. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time, synthesizing scientific achievements of linguistics and musicology, the polyphonic forms of a cappella choral works are analyzed as polycode texts. Due to the specifics of the choral art form as a musical and performing art, the nature of the perception of a musical text is multimodal. For performers who ‘decipher’ and ‘voice’ a musical notation, a musical text has one visual mode. For listeners, multimodality characterizes the practice of communication in terms of auditory, linguistic, spatial and visual resources, for example, the auditory mode when listening to a work without a visual range, or a polymodus complex when listening with a visual range. This refers to listening to music while simultaneously viewing the musical text of a work, observing the process of public performance, which in modern practice is often accompanied by a specially selected video sequence. The leading paradigm is the synergy of literary and textual sources and polyphonic form in works for a cappella choir by contemporary Russian composers. Based on the differentiation of the structure of a literary and textual source, the attribution of polyphonic forms of motet, madrigal, fugue and fugato is the subject of the work, while the goal is to form a research picture based on a close ‘polyphonic’ connection between word and music. In polyphonic analysis, it is important to determine the content of choral compositions and the composer’s method of dealing with the structure of a text source. A whole poem can be taken as the basis of a musical work (an example is the text-musical forms of motets and madrigals), one strophe, one line, one word (the analysis of fugato and fugue becomes the evidence base). An interesting case is the use as a text base of a polyphonic composition of individual syllables and phonemes (preludes and fugue-vocalizes) and a ‘silent’ performance - with a closed mouth. Thus, it is proved that the musical text is a complex multimodal complex in which the main information is conveyed by semiotically heterogeneous components. It is concluded that, on the one hand, a literary text influences the choice of a polyphonic form, on the other hand, it is often a static text that does not have an external plot development in the context of polyphonic dramaturgy and form and acquires internal dynamics of development to expand its semantic field.