The article is devoted to the Egyptian dancers, described in the Russian travel literature under the name “almeh”. The author traces the history of visits to Egypt by Russian travelers until 1917 and analyzes the information they managed to collect about Egyptian dancers, their working conditions, costumes and accessories, musical accompaniment, characteristic movements and choreography.

The accounts made by Russian travelers before revolution should be characterized as valuable sources for historical research in the Egyptian dance raks sharki in 19th - early 20th centuries. In the absence of photo and video materials, they preserved for history the names of the performers KuchukKhanem and Usta Sakne, detailed descriptions of the costumes of Egyptian dancers, recorded their typical movements, information about choreography and various genres of dance. This data allows us to reconstruct the historical forms of the Egyptian national dance, as well as to clarify the real image of Egyptian almeh which inspired writers, artists and choreographers all over the world.

The theme of the composer’s entry into the ballet theater is extremely important when studying the output of Igor Stravinsky, the creator of the great ballet scores of the 20th century. Usually, as the first guide of Stravinsky to the world of choreography, they name a stage director of The Firebird Mikhail Fokin, a student of Marius Petipa. In this article, the emphasis is shifted towards Marius Petipa himself, at whose performances Stravinsky was brought up in the years of his youth in St. Petersburg, comprehending the aesthetics and technique of classical ballet. No wonder the composer calls The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky stage one of his earliest and brightest theatrical impressions. Documentary evidences help to reconstruct the picture of Igor Stravinsky contacts with Petipa’s art: account books of Fyodor Stravinsky, a friend of Marius Petipa and his colleague in the imperial troupe; letters and memoirs; archival sources. The presented materials allow to assert that Petipa’s choreographic poetics influenced the formation of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and became one of the important components in the composer’s system of artistic values.

The article is devoted to the artistic and figurative idea of the poem The Copper Horseman and its implementation in the literary and plastic performance of the same name. The director of the production was Pavel Safonov, the choreographer was Yuri Petukhov, the performers were students of the Boris Shchukin Theater Institute and students of the Department of Choreography Education of the Vaganova Ballet Academy. Based on the analysis of the main thematic motifs of Alexander Pushkin’s text, an attempt is made to identify the originality of the director’s decision and the role of plastic scenes in it. With the expansion of the figurative-associative series of the «Petersburg story» by including fragments from other works of the poet, its main theme — the collision of the course of history and the personality of a person — is leveled in the dramatic part and transferred to the choreographic action.

This article examines the cinematic style of the Katsi trilogy by American director Godfrey Reggio. Each film “Koyaaniskatsi”, “Povakkatsi”, “Nakoikatsi” is analyzed separately from the point of view of the realization of the director’s idea.

The characteristics of each film are given, the features and unifying features of this trilogy, as well as postmodern aspects are considered.

In modern China, along with the national bamboo flute, the European academic flute is extremely popular, which begins to spread in concert life and teaching from the beginning of the 20th century. The article characterizes the system of flute education in several important aspects: educational institutions, the pedagogical community, the origins of methodological orientation, the scientific work of teachers. In the presentation of these materials, historical and analytical methods are used to provide an understanding of the panorama of the flute educational system. The most significant feature is described in sufficient detail — the active performing activities of teachers: their work in orchestras, participation in international competitions. These facts are revealed on the examples of the patriarchs of Chinese flute pedagogy Han Zhongjie and Li Xuequan, as well as about twenty teachers from different universities and conservatories of the next generations. To characterize the origin of the principles of the training system, the facts of inviting foreign masters with master classes are described. The scientific works of professors are shown and systematized by genres and topics. At the end of the article, the shortcomings and problems highlighted in the literature and supported by the author, who teaches the flute class at Xichang University, are outlined.

The article is devoted to the theoretical concept of the cluster proposed by the American The article is devoted to the theoretical concept of the cluster proposed by the American composer Henry Cowell. The composer’s work and his theoretical contribution to the development of second avant-garde music has been underestimated in Russian musicology for many years. This article proposes to make a radical reassessment of the theoretical role of “New Musical Resources” in the development of new music and theoretical thought. The proposed research frame is the extended piano, in which the cluster is the starting point of innovation in the field of modern piano technique. The fundamental elements of the cluster theory described by Cowell in his theoretical work “New Musical Resources”, begun in 1918–1919, published in 1930, are considered. One of the closest positions, in relation to working with sound and its complex representation, is the theory of the “Unified Time Field” by Stockhausen. Within its framework, the composer traces a close relationship between the overtone series and rhythmic proportions. In Cowell’s concept, the cluster is a continuation of the overtone series and supports the idea of a complex understanding of sound. These starting points also become the basis of Stockhausen’s theoretical thought. The article analyzes the process of expanding the timbre palette of the piano and the coloristic functions of the cluster in various modes of this phenomenon. The conclusion contains conclusions that the theory of the cluster, which served as the basis for many discoveries in the theory of composition of the twentieth century, offers a number of innovations. It opens a discourse in the psychoacoustic field around the categories of noise and sound, which combines the psychological and physiological characteristics of sound perception; creates the basis for an integral approach to the theory of new music, accumulating its fundamental concepts on the overtone series model.

This paper compares musical theatrical versions of the two ancient stories (the ancient Greek, and the ancient Roman one): Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) and Britten’s opera-mystery The Rape of Lucretia (1946). Identifying common features in genre, composition, dramatic and stylistic sphere, including the active assimilation of baroque components, the authors emphasize that the statuarity being more characteristic of the epically majestic Oedipus, but not alien to the dramatic and emotional Lucretia, is adjacent to the principles of symphonism. The musical conflict in both operas is seen as the collision of the Man and an insurmountable external force. Both Stravinsky and Britten subordinate the musical thematism associated with these characters to a similar logic of development, up to the parallels at the level of tonal semantics. The young Britten’s acquaintance with Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in 1936 later served as one of the impulses for his reference to the ancient topic in opera. But despite certain similarities between the two works, each reveals the author’s own individuality: the monumental neoclassicism of Oedipus contrasts with the lyric-psychological mode of expression which dominates in the chamber opera Lucretia.

Considering the special role of social practices in our lives nowadays, the author of the article, based on the methodology of Randall Collins, explains the priority of performative forms in contemporary art by the increased level of communicative processes in the society. Possibility of recreation of the model of the everyday interactive rituals in the framework of artificially created by an artist / composer artistic act allows us to consider performative installations a result of these processes. Analyzing installations as a spatial art, the author devotes special attention to the spectator’s / listener’s attention, proving through several examples that the social orientation of the performative musical installations is determined by the focus on transformation of the spectator’s mind through their disconnection with the world of familiar and expected. In direct contact with the installation structure, under the influence of unusual and not always comfortable visual and auditory impressions, the viewer is included in the process of understanding what is happening through his personal experience, associative series, comparison of the living and the inanimate, the movement of matter and sounds, new forms of their relationships. Considering installations as a kind of spatial art, the author points to a direct dependence of the type of installation on its location, points to the movement from a museum installation to a musical and theatrical one.

The article examines the impact of the ideas of the Catholic renaissance on the musical theater of the composers of “The Six” group. The search for new forms of art synthesis by the leading representatives of this association (A. Honegger, D. Milhaud, F. Poulenc), carried out in a creative dialogue with the masters of religious literature and drama theater (P. Claudel, G. Bernanos) is being studied. 

Examples of the sacralization of the word and music of the opera that took place in the process of this search are given. It is revealed how the neomysterial genre mixes of French composers, along with the use of actual forms and means of musical expression, appeal to the traditions of ancient liturgical and paraliturgical genres (masses, passions, morality, miracles, martyrs, sacred representationsdialogues). The main vector of plot development (spiritual improvement of the protagonist) is traced, the result of which is a shift in emphasis from external events to internal ones.

The article analyzes some of the works of the German composer Matthias Spahlinger (1944) in line with the philosophical dialectics of Hegel and Adorno. Сomposer, who defines his musical thinking as quite traditional, is located in a wide field of diverse musical and extra-musical philosophical influences, trends and styles. The ideas of Hegel, Adorno, Marx, Wittgenstein interact in the philosophical and intellectual space of his compositions, which is due to the specifics of his socio-political thinking. Since the 1970s, in fact, from the very early period of his work, the composer was worried about the conditions for the emergence and subsequent performance of the composition in the context of the relationship between the individual and the collective, where the individual is the personality of the composer himself, and the collective is the union of the performer and the listener. Spahlinger’s creative concept is based on the opposition to stable, historically developed musical structures, which consists of a double statement that generates a negation, and in some cases a final negation, which sometimes suggests the possibility of changing the double minus to the final plus. The conclusion from the article is the position that in the work of Spahlinger, the dialectic of Hegel and Adorno forms a semantic axis, and along its coordinate system its creative intentions are located, and at the same time, neither plus nor minus matter. The performers and listener put the emphasis in their “sympathetic interaction”.

In his symphonic opuses (and not only) the researchers of S. V. Rachmaninov’s work singled out reliance on three traditional stylistic directions – secular, folklore and spiritual (in particular, church singing). The composer himself noted the importance for him of these three sources when creating music. In the process of an analytical review of a number of memoir sources, orchestral works, it was determined that Rachmaninov managed to find a way that allowed him to organically embody in sounds what he designated as “opening new paths in music”. Research methods and methodology: To identify the features of Rachmaninov’s symphonic cycles, the methods of musicological and culturological analysis were applied, suggesting an integrated approach to the study of the composer’s selected works. The main part of the article introduces the thesis about the equivalence in the work of Rachmaninov of three stylistic trends in Russian culture: folklore, secular and ecclesiastical, defined as a “trinity”. In more detail, this article discusses the last of the designated series. In this regard, it seems appropriate to introduce the term “spirituality” as a special quality of the composer’s legacy. Along with others, it becomes an important constant, and the presented analysis of Rachmaninov’s three symphonies serves as confirmation of the musical embodiment of various semantic modes of this concept. Conclusion: the methods of embodiment in the symphonies of the three indicated meaningful layers and the achieved artistic result allow us to speak about the significance of the trinity in the composer’s works.

The purpose of the article is to identify the origins of musical performance art, tracing its roots in the avant-garde practices of the beginning of the 20th century — futurism and dadaism. Based on the synthetic nature of performance art, the author shows that already in the first avant-garde experiments, so called protoperformances, sound and music played an important role. Special treatment of texts’ phonetics, invention of noise-generating music instruments, involvement of chance element in the process of creation of musical compositions as a forerunner of aleatoric music and consequential non-traditional sound of the works by dadaists and futurists, — all of it violated the boundaries of familiar, had suggestive effect, triggered shock reaction and protests. Examination of the most illustrative examples of the musical pieces allowed us to consider them the origin of the musical performance art of the end of the 20th century.