SEMANTICS AND TECHNIQUE IN A. WEBERN CHAMBER INSTRUMENTAL WRITING: FROM TRADITIONS TO ALTERNATIVE

Abstract

The chamber-instrumental style of the Second Viennese School evolved from the embodiment and modernization of the traditions of European instrumentalism with an emphasis on its Austria-German branch. The fundamental generic features of chamber instrumentalism in the form of the ratio of voice parts based on their equi-potentiality and timbre complementarity were the initial and consonant with musical expressionism, technologically expressed by the twelve-tone composition. The chamber-instrumental style became the basis and the "title" sphere of artistic intents of creativity of such various in their aesthetic-poetic installations composers as A. Schönberg, A. Webern and A. Berg. Each of them, at his individually creative level, embodies the traditions of chamber instrumentalism as a method of thinking, reflected through the timbre complex work. The new chamber-instrumental styles, which formed under the sign of anti-romantic tendencies, were genetically related to them within rhetorical type of creativity inherent in academic art (Myhaylov A., Barsova I.). This meant immanent logic in using (consciously or intuitively) all the achievements of previous eras, even in the face of a radical rethinking of musically-linguistic structures. The Second Viennese historically developed on the basis of the Austro-German musical culture, in which, owing to the peculiarities of the national musical mentality, the rhetorical (lexical, musical-linguistic) principle was especially clear. This is reflected, in particular, in the clear post-romantic structural relationship of the chamber-instrumental music of the newcomers - both A. Schoenberg himself and his students and followers A. Berg and A. Webern. The article focuses on the chamber and instrumental ensemble as a special type of musical thinking, as well as distinguishes the style "constants" and "variables" of this artistic phenomenon. The main purpose of the article is to characterize the general and specific features of Second Viennese chamber-ensemble instrumentalism in the person of its representative, Anton Webern. In this connection, we propose the appropriate conclusions regarding the specifics and general patterns of the timbre complex in the chamber-instrumental style of the mentioned author, which was not specifically investigated in the previous works.