Time as a Concept in the Songs of Musorgsky
Date
2021-12-21
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Abstract
The songs of Modest Musorgsky have received rich attention in the Russian literature, but not very much in the English-speaking world. Many of them not only are unique within the broad traditions of the Lied, but also are notably unlike the body of the Russian classical song repertoire that is generally termed the Russian romance. The principal cultural, linguistic and historical influences stand in the way of comprehending his music by a non-Russian speaker, who often lacks the capacity for the intuitive feel of the cultural and linguistic nuances Musorgsky's songs contain. To enhance understanding of the difficult repertoire, this thesis offers a new way of analyzing song as a genre and music in general, based on the presumption that music is an art that exists in time. While any piece of music lasts a certain number of minutes and seconds, it also contains a notion of virtual time, that is a sequence of events that happen in the piece, in parallel with the clock time. To describe the method of observing the virtual time, this thesis analyzes the set of songs of increasing complexity by Musorgsky and other Russian composers to create a rounded system of coordinates that would provide convenient tools to speak about music on a level additional to the conventional theoretical analyses.
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Musorgsky, Russian, Music, Time, Classical, Song, Vocal, Gnoseology, Dargomyzhsky, Dargomizhsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Life, Death, Nursery
Citation
Mirakhmedova, M. (2021). Time as a Concept in the Songs of Musorgsky (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.