This article is dedicated to Vera Kostrovitskaya (1906–1979), who was a wonderful teacher, an outstanding training specialist, whose books make up the treasure trove of classical dance method. Her books «School of Classical Dance» and «100 lessons of Classical Dance» became manuals for all choreographic schools. A person who survived the war and the siege in Leningrad, preserved herself as a person, and it should be remembered.

The article is a report on the current state of the digitalization and accessibility of materials of the N. G. Sergeyev collection at Harvard Library. The number of accessible units, what percentage they form of the total, the page count of the accessible units, and of the total, are given for the main body of the collection, (MS Thr 245), and for several categories of the materials, like choreographic notations, piano reductions, répétiteurs, orchestral scores. The dynamics of the process is determined and some worrying characteristics are noted. The factors preventing the ballet community from gaining information about the actual state and progress of the digitalization of the Collection are named.

The article is devoted to the history of performances of Philippe Taglioni’s ballet «La Sylphide» which became a turning point in the history of ballet theater. In the ballet «La Sylphide» the dance appears as the owner of its own choreographic language. After staging this ballet, its development of ballet follows an open path. The choreographer created a performance for his talented daughter Maria Taglioni, whose work is one of the important pages in the history of ballet. The article reproduces in detail the detailed history of the creation by the choreographer Philippe Taglioni and the composer Jean Madeleine Schneitzhoffer, and also traces further productions that determined the fate of this ballet. Findings from the author’s research support the assertion that the creation of the ballet «La Sylphide» was a turning point in the history of ballet.

French dancer and choreographer Joseph Mazillier, author of the famous romantic ballets “Paquita”, “Satanilla”, “Diable a quatre”, devoted a significant part of his creative life to the Paris Opera. But in his career there was also a “Russian period”: one season, 1851-1852, he spent in the service of the Directorate of the Imperial theaters in St. Petersburg. During this time, he composed two new ballets (“La Jolie de Cand” and “Ver-Vert”), staged dances in A. Rubinstein’s debut Opera “The Battle of Kulikovo” and edited his works, which were already being performed on the St. Petersburg stage. However, Mazillier mentioned only in passing and with a condescending tone. An attempt to restore the Russian ballet to its name was made by Vladislav Ivanov, who published the book “Unknown Mazillier” in 2015, which became the first monograph about this bright figure of European romantic ballet. In the years since its publication, new documents related to Mazilye’s activities in St. Petersburg have been discovered; they have allowed us to supplement, correct and clarify the information contained in V. Ivano’s book. The author uses archival materials — service cases, correspondence between officials of the Imperial Theater Directorate, contracts stored in the Russian State historical archive, and updated materials of the Russian periodical press of the 19th century.

The article is devoted to the once famous Tatar ballet «The Enchanted Boy» by Z. Khabibullin. It is the first children’s ballet of Tatarstan, it went on the stage of the Tatar State academic opera and ballet theater named after M. Jalil for many years, where in the archives the information about the history of its creation and production is kept. The results of a comparative analysis of the libretto of two ballet editions are presented, their literary primary sources are comprehended. Special attention is paid to the story about the authors and performers of the work.

The article is devoted to the innovative ballet by G. Angiolini and K. Gluck «Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue», created in the middle of the 18th century. For the first time in Russian musicology, the stages of Angiolini’s work on the performance, from the script concept to its numerous stage incarnations, are recreated. The paper considers copies of versions of musical manuscripts of K. Gluck’s ballet, made in the second half of the 18th century, and focuses on the author’s version of the musical score. This article examines the individual main components of the performance «Don Juan», which played a significant role in transforming the ballet genre and had a huge impact on composers and choreographers of the second half of the 18th century.

The article is devoted to the problem of preserving classical heritage ballets. This is very important nowadays, as preserving the art of classical ballet is impossible without the continuity of performance traditions. However, over the past ten years Saint-Petersburg stages have seen a variety of both classical and modern productions, which has inevitably affected the quality of performance in those ballets known all over the world.

The authors study the methodology of preserving the classical heritage, using the methods of comparative analysis and historical explication of particular performance techniques in Russia and Western countries.

The author arrives at the conclusion that, when dealing with classical heritage ballets in the process of their restoration, it is important to distinguish between such key notions as «restoration», «reconstruction» and «editing». Having analyzed different interpretations of such terms as «restoration», «reconstruction» and «editing» and compared ballet experts’ viewpoints on the problem, the author concluded that there is a strong connection between the performance traditions and the quality of the ballet production, namely, between the dance logic implied by the choreographers of the past and stylistic characteristics of the choreographic language for both the choreographer and dancers.

The music of Abay Kunanbayev (1845–1904) — the famous Kazakh poeteducator, philosopher, composer — is the property of a world musical culture. Music finds its application in various fields of art and education. It could often find Abay’s music interpretation and comprehension in choreographic art. Nevertheless, most of Abay’s musical heritage as a rule remains beyond the scope and accessibility of a wide audience. In this article, the authors study and describe the experience of the implemented scientific-creative project, the which purpose was to expand the range of Abay’s works used in choreography on the example of a Kazakh dance lesson. The methodology used by the authors during the implementation of the project is based on the methods of archival, analytical and experimental work. The result of the authors’ research was the introduction of Abay’s musical compositions, which are rarely used in choreography, in training dance combinations for exercise at the stick and in the middle of the hall (for the female and male sections of the Kazakh dance lesson). In this article, based on the results of a scientific-creative project, the authors point to the self-sufficiency of Abay’s musical heritage and the possibility of its inclusion in a wide range of educational and creative processes not only in Kazakhstan, but also outside the country.

The article is dedicated to Nicholas Maw, a British composer of the second half of the 20th century. The composer’s work consists of various music genres and is characterized by a combination of the traditions of the past (notably romanticism) and novelties of music culture of the second half of the 20th century. Main stages of artistic development of the composer are considered through three works which have special places in his legacy: “Scenes and Arias”, “Odyssey”, “Sophie’s Choice”. A term “narration” and its signification in Maw’s system of thoughts is given attention. The list of works of Nicholas Maw is included the article.

The article was written on the basis of documentary materials — the memoirs of the contemporary American composer Philip Glass (1937) «Words without Music». Having studied memoirs, interviews and research literature of different years, the author traces the life and creative path of Glass as a prominent representative of the experimental art of the United States of the second half of the 20th century, deeply connected with national cultural traditions. Close contacts with the avantgarde New York environment, an appeal to Asian culture, as well as to jazz and rock predetermined Glass’s self-identification as an American Maverick composer, distinguished by his principled orientation towards updating the musical language, experimentalism, the invention of new styles (musical minimalism) and techniques of write (in particular, the original repetitive method of organizing music material — a linear additive process and a linear subtractive process).

The article is devoted to one of the most important aspects of the study of the screen poetics of television and films by M. A. Zakharov — the study of the specifics of the director’s plot of Zakharov’s screen works. An analysis of the plots of individual Zakharov’s television and motion pictures showed that they are variants of a general metaplot — the plot of the «game of God», which is characteristic of European art and is inherent in, for example works such as Shakespeare’s «The Tempest» and the novels «Robinson Crusoe» by D. Defoe, «Dr. Moreau’s Island» by H. Wells and «The Magus» by J. Fowles. Films «Twelve Chairs» (1976), «An Ordinary Miracle» (1978), «The Very Munchhausen’» (1979), «The house that Swift built» (1982), «Love Formula» and others were filmed in the years when the «sixties» Zakharov ranked himself among the «new lost generation». In Zakharov’s screen works, the plot of the «game of God» had a pronounced lyrical character and allowed in an artistic form to reflect on the limits of a person’s capabilities, on the ways of his self-realization and on those boundaries, the crossing of which threatens to lose oneself.

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of interpretation of the symphonic poem «Island of the Dead» by S.V. Rachmaninov, created during the late romanticism in the work of contemporary choreographers and directors of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Considering the features of musical and choreographic drama staged by Evgeny Panfilov, Boris Eifman, in the first creative experiments of young choreographers associated with the work of S. V. Rachmaninov, one can come to the conclusion that the original figurative-symbolic plot of the confrontation between life and death is revealed, supplemented, enhanced by drama and emotional and psychological saturation in each of the productions. The prospect of research in this direction is the analysis of the aesthetic and structural-compositional peculiarities of the artistic interpretation of classical instrumental music not only in the art of classical dance, but also in various genres of modern choreography.

In recent decades they talk a lot about the end of the postmodernism: they offer ideas of didgimodernism, cosmodernism and other. In this article author considers different conceptions from the position of musicology. The conception of metamodernism look most fruitful for music analyze: it talk about return of affect, oscillation, post-irony and search of new vertical.