Topos of death in rhetoric of partes concerts

Abstract

Partes music, although studied for half a century, still remains a little-known and littleperformed part of Ukrainian cultural heritage. The difference between the general education and musical training of baroque singers and modern musicians influences the understanding and interpretation of this music in modern artistic realisations. With the emergence in European culture in the 20th century of the interpretation movement – Historically Informed Performance, the need for other methods of understanding, studying and researching early musical heritage that is written before the 19th century was reclaimed. In accordance with the ideas of historical performance, the article examines the method of interpretation of images and affects embedded in partes music through the prism of cultural and educational practices of the 17th–18th centuries. This period is characterized by the unity of aesthetic categories and tools of artistic expressiveness of various types of arts, music, poetry and rhetoric, in particular. Partes concert is a liturgical genre that is written on the text of sticherons, troparions and other liturgical parts of the Eastern Orthodox rite. Thus, analysis of music-text interrelations becomes more complicated because of the presence partes verbal texts theosophical discourses and allegorical biblical images. In order to better understand the connection between musical and verbal text in the partes compositions, the rhetorical methods of evocation the semantic images, ideas and toposes in Ukrainian baroque poetry were researched beforehand. Next, the linguistic means in the expression of the verbal semantic sphere and the effect on the reader or listener, which was the aim of certain rhetorical techniques, were compared. Musical equivalents of verbal rhetorical devices were analysed and examples of semantically related musical-rhetorical figures with other words for the desired effect were found. Therefore, such an understanding of the musical language in partes works determines other performance choices in its artistic realization.