«Everyone writes Music to Poems, and I write Poems to Music...» (features to the problem of intermediality in the cycle «Night concerts» by Mykola Bazhan)

Abstract

The relevance of this article is the need for practical implementation of the methodological developments available in the field of intermedial research and accumulated mainly in literary criticism, in the musicological field.

Main objectives – update the integrative potential of one of the “most musical” Ukrainian poets Mykola Bazhan, having considered selected poems from the “Night Concerts” series in the context of intermediary perspectives and attempting to test general theoretical principles using a specific example of intermedia analysis.

The methodology. The study of intermediary objects goes beyond one disciplinary field and involves the use of research methods borrowed from related disciplines. In this case the methodological support was served by an interdisciplinary approach using a combination of analytical and comparative techniques. In particular, they used structural-typological (to characterize the specifics of the associative-figurative thinking of the poet), contextual and interpretative (to determine the expressive-semantic load of elements of a poetic text), comparative methods, as well as elements of phonemic analysis. Their complex application made it possible, by way of parallels, analogies, and comparisons, to reveal the specifics and methods of the embodiment of musical imagery in a poetic work.

Results and conclusions. Analytical consideration of the relationship between words and music seems to be most fruitful in the intermediary context. In the cycle “Night Concerts” by M. Bazhan, we have an example of not just “translating” musical images into a visual-poetic series, but interpreting one art by another, a kind of art synesthesia, semiotic translation as a metaphor, based on the suggestiveness peculiar only to music, the elusiveness of moments that captured an endless spectrum of human feelings. In the poem “The Voice of Edith Piаf” an emotional “audial” portrait of the singer was created using a sound palette in which music is included in the system of rhythmic and phonical characteristics of the poetic text. Content and genre nature of creativity of Edith Piaf, the poet revealed the magic of her musical intonation, first of all, through the “instrumentation” of the verse, its sound and metrhythmic organization.

Numerous alliterations, assonances, other methods of sound symbolism, well-defined metro-rhythmic configurations, a rich palette of sound associations inlaid into the fabric of the poem testify to the sound image found by the poet, which is the immanent sign of music — the art of intonational nature.

The prospect of such research is to determine the poetics of intermedial works create a common typology of intermediality and improve the methods of intermedial analysis.