The Principle of Self-Contained Formation of the Musical Form: Functional and Semantic Aspects

Abstract

In the artistic process the task of creating an artistically integral and completed form is initially set and then solved by the artist who created it. A work of art appears as a result of the decisions made, the outcomes of which compel the recipients of the art work to interpret their role and meaning. Being present in a broad field of compositional possibilities induces the analyzing musician towards a search for the criteria of their arrangement. In the present research work the present function is assigned to two principles, universal in their nature, formulated in Russian musicology by O. Sokolov – those of progressive development and self-contained formation. Turning her attention on the second of them, the author of the work examines its manifestation in various genres – from small-scale works to cyclic forms. By the example of works by Mussorgsky, Debussy, Webern and Prokofiev, as well as Chopin’s Prelude No. 2 opus 28 (1831) and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 (1960), original variants of implementing the phenomenon of self-containment capable of expanding the perception of its functional-semantic potential.

The chosen angle of research appeals not only to Sokolov’s terminology brought out into the article’s title, but is also relatable to the methodology of the scholar who diffuses the laws of musical form on literary writing. The present circumstance makes it possible to turn to verbal sources – Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, Anton Chekhov’s novelette The Black Monk, and Alexander Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. 

During the process of studying the mechanisms of self-contained formation their dependence on the level of the complexity of the form and the particularities of style and genre is discovered. In the small-scale compositions the action of the principle is realized by means of intonational evolution on an inner-thematic level; the self-contained quality of the large-scale forms becomes the result of a special strategy of juxtaposition of themes. Frequently both processes are predetermined dramaturgically, which inevitably implicates not only functional, but also semantic waymarks into analytics.

Keywords: self-contained formation, supra-principle, Thomas Mann, Frédéric Chopin, Anton Webern, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, The Black Monk, The Military Leader, Les pas sur la neige, The Tale of Tsar Saltan