Manifestations of composer's individuality in transcriptions

Abstract

Relevance of the study. Composer’s individuality is one of the key concepts in contemporary musical discourse. Its study requires a variety of approaches — philosophical, aesthetic, historical, psychological, sociological, cultural, biographical, etc. However, the essence of a composer's individuality cannot be understood without a professional analysis of the musical structure of a work.

The Main objective of the study is to specify the dialectic of interaction between the typical (collective, well-known) and the atypical (individual) at the level of instrumentation in the work of artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The methodology of the study is technological and comparative analysis applied in various dimensions: since the subject of consideration is transcriptions, they are compared with each other, but also with their prototypes.

Results and conclusions. Webern's main method of working with the original in his orchestral transcription of Bach's 6-voice Ricercar from ‘The Musical Offering’ is a motivic and thematic analysis of the source material and the presentation of the results of this analysis through orchestration. Karl Dahlhaus calls this method ‘analytical instrumentation’ (Dahlhaus C., 1978, p. 181). Its essence is to assign different motifs to different instruments and thus, with the help of timbral differences, emphasise the motivic and thematic structure of the fugue and the functional difference between the motifs. The constant timbral recolouring of the melodic lines in Ricercar's transcription is used by Webern to clearly define the form of the work, which unfolds as a pulsation of thematic saturation and relaxation. In his transcription of Bach's organ prelude and fugue in E flat major, Schoenberg, compared to Webern, resorts to a fundamentally different, much more traditional orchestral style characteristic of the late Romantic period. Both works — by Schoenberg and Webern — are directly related to Bach's musical ideas and complement them well. However, the ways in which two orchestrators interact with ‘borrowed’ material in them differ significantly, in accordance with the priorities that the two artists realised in their own work. The individual traits of the composers' personalities are vividly manifested in Leonid Hrabovsky's Six Pieces for String Quartet (1991), created as transcriptions of M. Leontovich's choral miniatures. The melodic and harmonic structure of each piece generally reproduces the structure of the original. Leontovych's tonality and the musical character are preserved, as well. However, the texture of the original undergoes significant reworking in accordance with the performance capabilities of the string quartet. Various techniques of playing the strings are used, including those borrowed from extended performance techniques which appear in the original works by Hrabovsky. Instead of precise repetition of the original couplets Hrabovsky always presents a sort of ‘strict variations’. When analysing the transcription, it is especially easy to separate the ‘original’ from the “borrowed”, so they particularly clearly show how differently outstanding artists can work with “borrowed” material, while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original and without significantly altering its text.