NATIONAL MENTALITY IN UKRAINIAN AND CHINESE CHAMBER MUSIC: A COMPARATIVE ASPECT

Abstract

The article attempts to show common and distinctive features in the Ukrainian and Chinese musical mentality on the example of the chamber music genre, which is one of the many steps on this path of mutual understanding. It is argued that the explication of ideas about the essence of the national mentality in the chamber music by Ukrainian and Chinese composers in the comparative coordinates West-East allowed to identify the main principles of the reflection of the national mentality in chamber music. At the generalised conceptual level, the following dual pairs have been distinguished: the idea of heartfelt experience and the idea of contemplation of subtle beauty, which are seen as reflections of Ukrainian and Chinese national-mental Ego-concepts. The dominant features of the expression of these ideas are romantic expression, fullness of «heartfelt» feelings in Ukrainian music and impressionistic and symbolic lyrics in Chinese music, which in their culminating manifestations reach, respectively, romantic passion and romanticimpressionistic hymnality. At the same time, it is noted that the interpenetration of cultures brought to Ukrainian music the «oriental» contemplation, reflexivity, realised in a number of works of music of the twentieth and early twentieth centuries, while Chinese music borrowed the concept of the traditional European system of genres and forms with their drama, tonal and harmonic system and other musical and linguistic means that «work» to reflect the specifics of the national Ego, and this process is an important factor on the way to an adequate understanding of the «Other». At the same time, at the musical and linguistic level, the Ukrainian version remains within the European system and its evolutionary progress, while the Chinese version is represented by a synthesis of the European system and the colourful ethnic harmony of the «Lui» system, sometimes using national instruments that create a specific national flavour. Further study of this musical and linguistic specificity as a means of mutual understanding of the West and East offers prospects for future research on the declared topic.