music

an art form that reflects reality and affects man through sensible and specially organized sound sequences consisting chiefly of tones (sounds of definite pitch). Music is a specific variety of the sound made by people.

Like other varieties of human sound, such as speech and signaling with instruments or sound, music has the capacity to express human thoughts, emotions, and volition in an audible form, to serve as a means of communication between people, and to control the behavior of people. Music is very closely related to speech, or, to be more precise, to inflection, which reveals the inner state of man and his emotional attitude toward the world through changes in the pitch and other characteristics of the sound of the voice. Because of the similarity between music and speech, it is possible to refer to inflection in music.

At the same time, music is essentially different from all other varieties of human sound. Although musical sounds are, to some degree, similar to everyday sounds, in principle they are distinguished from them by strict pitch and temporal (rhythmic) organization. Musical sounds belong to historically developed systems based on tones chosen by the musical practice of a particular society. Sounds of indefinite pitch (noises) or those whose pitch is irrelevant but which play a secondary role are also used in music. In every musical work tones form a system of vertical units (harmonies) and horizontal sequences—the form of the work. Emotional states and processes, as well as volition, play a commanding role in the content of music. This is a consequence of the acoustic (inflectional) and temporal character of music, which enables it, on the one hand, to rely on the centuriesold human habit of revealing emotions and communicating them to other members of society primarily by means of sounds, and on the other hand, coincidentally to express emotional experience as movement, as a process with all its changes and nuances, dynamic growths and abatements, and harmony and conflicts.

Of the various types of emotions, music gives expression primarily to moods. Also widely reflected in musical content are the emotional aspects of the individual’s intellectual and volitional qualities, as well as the processes corresponding to them. Thus, music can reveal human character as well as emotional states. Because it is unequaled for its concrete (though not verbal), highly subtle, and “infectious” expression of emotions, music has been widely defined as the “language of the soul” (A. N. Serov).

“Artistic thoughts,” which are closely related to emotions, or “heartfelt experiences,” are also part of the content of music. However, without the help of words and other extramusical factors, music cannot express all kinds of thoughts. Limited concrete thoughts and communications that give information about a particular fact and limited abstract thoughts and communications that do not arouse emotional and visual associations are not inherent parts of the language of music. Nonetheless, music is wide open to thoughts and communications expressed in concepts related to the dynamic side of social and psychical phenomena, as well as to moral qualities, character traits, and human emotional states.

In their desire to express more philosophical and social ideas, composers often transcend the limits of absolute (instrumental nonprogrammatic) music, turning to stage action and, in particular, to the word as the bearer of concrete conceptual content (vocal and instrumental program music). Owing to the synthesis of music with words or with stage action, new types of musical images are formed, which are firmly associated in the public mind with conceptions and ideas expressed by other components of the synthesis. Subsequently, these new musical images enter absolute music as the communicators of conceptions and ideas previously expressed only by words or actions. To express ideas composers also use sound symbols—melodies or folk tunes that originated in society or existed in a specific social milieu and that have become “musical emblems” of a particular conception. They may also create new “musical symbols,” such as leitmotifs. Thus, a broad and continuously enriched circle of ideas enters the content of music.

A comparatively limited place in musical content is held by visual images of concrete phenomena, which are embodied in musical representations—that is, in sounds that reproduce the sensual marks of various phenomena. The objective reason for the small role of representation in music is that hearing, in comparison to seeing, has much less power to communicate to man the concrete material signs of objects. Nonetheless, music includes numerous sketches of nature, “portraits” of various people, and pictures or “scenes” from the life of various social strata of various countries and periods. Although the images in them are inevitably subordinated to musical logic, such works offer a representation (reproduction) of the sounds of nature (for example, the sound of wind, water, or singing birds), man (speech inflections), and society (various sounds that are a part of everyday life). They also try to re-create the concrete sensual signs of objects, using associations (for example, the singing of birds to convey a picture of the woods), analogies (a broad sweep in the melody to suggest spaciousness), and synesthesia, or ties between auditory and visual sensations or tactile sensations and sensations of weight.

The content of music may be epic, dramatic, or lyrical. However, because it is nongraphic, music is best suited to the lyrical. In general, positive images have prevailed in musical content. For a long time, however, especially since the romantic period, negative images, as well as irony, caricature, and the grotesque, have also been part of music. Even so, not negation or castigation, but affirmation—“singing in praise of someone or something”—continues to be the most important aspect of musical content. Music’s organic tendency to disclose and emphasize the best in man adds to its importance as a means for expressing the principles of humanism and as an agent of moral and educational functions.

Musical form—the system of musical sounds in which emotions, thoughts, and the composer’s images are realized—serves as the material embodiment or means of existence for the content of music. Even individual musical sounds possess primary expressive potentialities. Each can arouse the physiological sensations of satisfaction or displeasure, excitement or tranquillity, and tension or relaxation, as well as various synesthetic sensations (for example, heaviness or lightness, warmth or cold, and darkness or light) and the simplest spatial associations. These possibilities may be used in any work of music, but they are usually secondary to the various resources for psychological and aesthetic effect, which are part of the deeper strata of musical form, where sounds are elements of entire structures.

In every period the music of every nation (natsiia, nation in the historical sense) is characterized by a definite “set” of stable sound combinations (inflections), as well as rules (norms) for their use. Such a set may be called the musical “language” of a given nation and period. Using the concrete elements and general rules of extant musical languages, altering them, and creating new ones, the composer develops his own, to some degree unique, musical language, which is necessary for the realization of his original musical ideas.

Although the musical languages of various periods, nations, and composers are extraordinarily diverse, they share some principles concerning pitch and the temporal, or rhythmic, organization of tones. In the majority of musical languages, pitch is organized on the basis of a mode, or tonality, and temporal relationships rest on meter. The coherent, meaningful unfolding (in one voice) of the pitch and temporal relationships of musical sounds, based on mode and meter, gives rise to melody, the most important of the expressive means of music, its “soul.”

As the separate elements of a composition’s form are united and coordinated, a general structure made up of several substructures evolves. Among the basic structural units are melody, rhythm, mode or tonality, texture, timbre, dynamics, and tempo. Of special importance is the thematic structure, which consists of themes and the various types and stages of their variation and development. In the majority of musical styles, themes are the material repositories of musical images.

All of the substructures are joined and coordinated by a syntactical structure, which unites motifs, phrases, statements, and periods, and by a compositional structure, which unites parts, sections, and movements. Syntactical and compositional structures make up musical form in the narrow sense of the term (that is, the composition of a musical work). Because of the relative independence of form in music, stable, long-standing types of compositional structures have evolved—standard musical forms (in the narrow sense of the term) capable of embodying a broad range of images. Among the standard forms that have prevailed in European music for several centuries are the binary and ternary forms, including variations, the rondo, the sonata-allegro, and the fugue. Standard forms have also developed in Oriental music. Each standard form reflects the characteristic, or the most prevalent types of movement in nature, society, and human consciousness (the origin or birth of phenomena, their repetition, their development, and conflicts between them).

There are three basic varieties of musical activity: composing, performing, and perception. Correspondingly, each musical work goes through three stages: creation, reproduction, and hearing. At each stage, musical activity is creative, but to varying degrees. The composer creates the music, the performer reproduces and re-creates it in a personal manner, and the listener perceives it in a more or less personal way.

The musical culture of a society is made up of composing, performing, and perception, as well as other forms of musical activity—the dissemination and propagandizing of music, scholarly research, criticism, and the training of specialists. Each of these basic activities has its own structure. Thus, in a developed musical culture there are many varieties of composition, which can be classified under a number of rubrics: content, means of performance, synthesis with other art forms or with speech, function, setting of performance, type of composition, and style. In terms of content, a composition may be lyric, epic, dramatic, heroic, tragic, or humorous. From another perspective, music may be classified as serious or light. If the means of performance is considered, music may be described as vocal or instrumental, solo, ensemble, orchestral, choral, or mixed. (It is also possible to classify works using more precise definitions of the makeup of the performance group—for example, works for symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra, or jazz ensemble.)

Syntheses of music with other art forms and with speech include theater music, music for the dance, program music, recitations set to music, and vocal music with words. Vocalises (singing without words) and absolute instrumental music (non-programmatic) are not syntheses. In terms of function, music is classified as applied or pure.

Setting of performance may be considered in classifying a work. Some music is designated for performance in a special setting, in which the audience is separated from the performers. Other works are intended for mass performance or for listening in an everyday setting. Works to be performed in special settings may be subdivided into theater music and concert music, and works for everyday settings and mass performance, into mass-everyday and ritual music. Each of these four subdivisions, or genre groups, can be further subdivided. Theater music breaks down into works for the musical theater, the dramatic theater, and motion pictures; concert music, into symphonic music, chamber music, and variety stage music; mass-everyday music, into music for singing and movement; and ritual music, into music for sacred and secular rituals. Finally, the subdivisions of mass-everyday music are further classified, according to their function, as songs (hymn, lullaby, serenade, and barcarole, for example), dances (for example, the gopak, waltz, and polonaise), and marches (drill marches and funeral marches, for example).

Musical works may be classified according to the type of composition and the musical language of the means of performance. Within the genre groups, various one-movement or cyclical genres are distinguished, according to the setting of the performance. For example, theater music includes opera, ballet, and operetta; concert music includes the symphony, suite, overture, tone poem, instrumental concerto, oratorio, cantata, solo sonata, trio, quartet, and art song; and ritual music includes the psalm, mystery and miracle play, chorale, Mass, and requiem. In turn, the genres may be divided into smaller units according to the same criteria, but on a more precise level. Thus, the opera, operetta, oratorio, and cantata include the aria, ensemble, and chorus; the ballet comprises the adagio and solo variation; and the symphony, sonata, and chamber instrumental ensemble include the andante and the scherzo. Every period and national music culture has its own characteristic set of genres.

In terms of style, musical works may be considered from the perspective of history, region, nation, group, or individual composer. In the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th various hypotheses claimed that the sources of music were the inflections of emotionally excited speech (H. Spencer), the singing of birds and the love calls of animals (C. Darwin), rhythms from the labor of primitive man (K. Bücher), human sound signals (C. Stumpf), and magical incantations (J. Combarieu). On the basis of archaeological and ethnologic data, contemporary materialist scholars believe that in primitive society music “ripened” gradually as part of people’s everyday activity and as a primitive syncretic complex not yet differentiated from ordinary activity—a proto-art containing the seeds of music, dance, poetry, and other art forms and important for communication, organization of joint labor and rituals, and the emotional influence necessary to inculcate in individuals the spiritual qualities demanded by the group. Sequences of numerous sounds of indefinite pitch (imitation of the singing of birds, animal sounds), which were originally chaotic and diverse, gave way to melodies and folk tunes consisting of only a few tones differentiated logically into tones of rest and movement. Frequent repetition of melodic and rhythmic formulas that had become part of a society’s everyday life led to the gradual realization and mastery of the possibilities for the organization of sounds. The simplest systems of musical sounds, in the establishment of which musical instruments played a major role, took shape, as did elementary forms of meter and harmony. This contributed to the initial recognition of the expressive possibilities of tones and combinations of tones.

In the period of the disintegration of the primitive communal (tribal) system, when artistic activity gradually became distinct from practical activity and the syncretic complex of proto-art gradually broke down, music as an independent art form was born. Ingrained in the myths of various peoples is the idea that music is a powerful force, capable of affecting nature and curing diseases, for example. With the emergence of classes, musical culture, which had once belonged to all of society, disintegrated in terms of its content and the social bearers of its traditions into the culture of the ruling classes and that of the oppressed (the people). Musical activity was classified as professional and nonprofessional, or amateur. The independent existence of music folklore as the nonprofessional art of the people dates from this time. The musical creativity of the popular masses became the foundation for the musical culture of society as a whole, the richest source of images and expressive means for professional creativity.

History. ANTIQUITY. Characteristic of musical culture of the slaveholding and early feudal states of antiquity (Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, India, China, Greece, Rome, and the Transcaucasian and Middle Asian states) was the existence of professional musicians, most of whom were both composers and performers, who worked at the temples and at the courts of rulers and of the aristocracy and who participated in mass rituals and public festivals. The functions of music continued to be predominantly material and spiritual. However, even in antiquity the aesthetic aspect of music emerged, and the first works intended only for listening were created (for example, psalms and instrumental pieces performed in Greece at musical competitions). Various genres of songs and dances developed. In many of them the original unity of poetry, singing, and dancing was preserved. Music played an important role in theater presentations, particularly in Greek tragedy. Musical instruments such as the harp and the lyre, as well as ancient wind and percussion instruments, were perfected, acquiring stable shape and pitch. Although the first systems of notation (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or letters) appeared in antiquity, for the most part, music continued to be preserved and communicated orally. Gradually the teaching of music and systems of music aesthetics and theory emerged. In theory and in practice, music was considered an activity closely related to science, handicrafts, and religious worship—that is, it was viewed as a “model” of the world that contributed to the knowledge of its laws and as a very powerful means for affecting nature and man (a form of magic). Consequently, rigid social (and in some countries, state) regulations were established concerning the use of music of various types and even the use of the various modes.

THE MIDDLE AGES. In Europe during the Middle Ages, a new feudal musical culture developed, combining professional art, amateur music-making, and folklore. Because the church dominated all aspects of intellectual life, the work of musicians in churches and monasteries was the foundation of professional musical art. Secular professional music was at first left only to singers who created and performed epic tales at court, in the homes of the nobility, or among warriors (bards and skalds, for example). Amateur and semiprofessional forms of music-making gradually developed among the knights: in France, the art of the troubadours and trouvéres, and in Germany, that of the minnesingers and urban craftsmen. All conceivable types, genres, and forms of songs were cultivated. New musical instruments, including some that had originated in the Orient (for example, the viol and the lute), came into use, and ensembles of various instruments emerged.

Among the peasantry, folklore flourished. Professional folk musicians, including story tellers and wandering performers who represented several art forms at once (jongleurs, mimes, minstrels, Spielleute, and skomorokhí), were also popular. But music was still limited almost entirely to practical and religious functions. Composing was united with performance (in the person of the composer-performer), as well as with perception. In its content and its form music was dominated by the collective principle. The particular was subordinated to the general and was not differentiated from it. The master musician was simply the best musical representative of the community. Rigid traditionalism and adherence to canons prevailed. The establishment, preservation, and spread of traditions and standards, and concurrently their gradual renewal with fresh material, were curtailed by the shift from neumes, which only indicated the approximate character of melodic movement, to linear notation (Guido d’Arezzo, 11th century), which made possible the precise designation of pitch.

Gradually, the content of music, its genres, its forms, and its expressive resources became richer. In the sixth and seventh centuries a rigidly regulated system of monophonic (monodic) church music based on the diatonic modes (Gregorian chant) and combining recitative (psalm tones) and singing (hymns) developed in Western Europe. Polyphonic music emerged around the early 11th century. New vocal (choral) and vocal-instrumental (choir and organ) genres were developed, including the organum, the motet, the conductus, and, later, the Mass. In 12th-century France the first school of composition took shape at the Cathedral of Notre Dame (Léonin and Pérotin). Just before the Renaissance, professional musicians began to prefer polyphonic to monophonic music (the ars nova in 14th-century France and Italy). Secular genres, including songs, became more important (G. de Machaut).

In Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia original musical cultures with their own systems of modes, genres, and forms developed. The sacred znamennyi chant (basic melodic formulas of the Orthodox Church) flourished in Byzantium, Bulgaria, Kievan Rus’, and later, Novgorod. Although it was based on the diatonic modes (the system of glasy), the zhamennyi chant was limited exclusively to vocal genres, such as anthems, canticles, and hymns, and it used a special system of notation (kriuki, “hooks”).

During the same period a new feudal musical culture developed in the East (the Arab caliphates, the countries of Central Asia, Iran, India, China, and Japan). Secular professionalism, which attained a virtuoso level, prevailed. Music was restricted to oral tradition and to monodic forms which, however, became highly refined in melody and rhythm. In the Orient stable national and international systems of musical thought developed, combining certain modes, genres, and inflectional and compositional structures (for example, the mugam, the magam, and the raga).

THE RENAISSANCE. In Western and Central Europe music began to make the transition from feudal to bourgeois culture during the Renaissance (14th to 16th centuries). Secular art flourished on the foundation of the ideology of humanism. To a significant degree, music was freed of the regulations assigning it an exclusively practical function. Its aesthetic and cognitive functions and its capacity to reflect man’s inner world and his environment were developed. Individualism achieved prominence in music, which was, to a great degree, liberated from the authority of traditional, prescribed formulas. The perception of music gradually became separate from composing and performance, and the public emerged as an independent part of musical culture. Amateur instrumental music flourished. The lute was especially popular. In everyday life, singing became more important. Simple polyphonic songs, including villanellas and frottolas (Italy) and chansons (France), were created, as well as four- and five-part madrigals (Luca Marenzio, Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa), which were more complex from the standpoint of refinement of style and difficulty of performance. Many of the madrigals featured chromatic harmony. In Germany semiprofessional music associations of townsmen and craftsmen (the guilds of the Meistersingers) created many songs. (One of the most famous Meistersingers was Hans Sachs.) Hymns were written for mass social, national, and religious movements—for example, the Hussite hymn (Bohemia), the Huguenot psalm (France), and the Lutheran chorale, which originated during the Reformation and the 16th-century Peasant War in Germany.

In professional music, a cappella, polyphonic, diatonic choral music (strict counterpoint) achieved full development in the Mass and the motet, or secular polyphonic song. Complex forms of imitation, such as canon, were used. The chief schools of composition were the Franco-Flemish, or Netherlands school (Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, and Orlandus Lassus), the Roman school (Palestrina), and the Venetian school (Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Gabrieli). Masters of choral composition achieved prominence in Poland and Bohemia. Instrumental music, in which imitative polyphony also developed, became independent of vocal music. Musical scholarship flourished, and treatises on music theory were written (Glarean of Switzerland and G. Zarlino and V. Galilei of Italy).

After the liberation of Russia from the Mongol-Tatar yoke, folk music flourished, and in professional music the znamenny chant was revived. The creative work of composers and singers such as Fedor Khristianin developed, an original polyphony (strochnoe chant) emerged, and large music groups were formed (the Choir of Patriarchal Singing Clerks, 16th century).

THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES. European music continued to make the transition from feudal to bourgeois culture during the 17th century and the first half of the 18th. Secular music achieved dominance, although religious music continued to be very important in Germany and a number of other countries. In content, music embraced a broad range of themes and images, including philosophical, historical, and contemporary civic ones. The musical activity of the public developed rapidly, centering on permanent public music institutions, including opera houses and philharmonic (concert) societies. Stringed instruments played with a bow (the violin and cello, for example) acquired their present shape, and the first pianoforte was built (1709, B. Cristofori, Italy). The printing of music became more sophisticated. Music education expanded, and conservatories were established in Italy. Music criticism became separate from music scholarship (J. Mattheson, Germany, early 18th century).

In the development of composition, the 17th and 18th centuries were characterized by the combined influences of artistic styles such as the baroque (Italian and German instrumental and choral music), classicism (Italian and French opera), and rococo (French instrumental music), and by the gradual shift from previous genres, styles, and forms to new ones that still dominate European music. As the Passion (H. Schütz and J. S. Bach in Germany) and the Mass continued to develop, new vocal-instrumental genres emerged and quickly gained a leading position. Among them were the opera (C. Monteverdi and A. Scarlatti in Italy; J. B. Lully and J. P. Rameau in France; and H. Purcell in England), the oratorio (G. Carissimi in Italy; G. F. Handel in Germany and England), and the cantata (Bach). New instrumental genres were created, including the orchestral and solo concerto (A. Corelli, A. Vivaldi, G. Tartini, Bach, and Handel), the chamber ensemble and the solo sonata (G. Vitali, Corelli, and D. Scarlatti). Organ music was developed by G. Frescobaldi, D. Buxtehude, Bach, and Handel, and harpsichord music, by W. Byrd, J. Bull, and Purcell (England) and F. Couperin and Rameau (France). The suite took on a new form that combined contemporary popular dances.

At the end of the 18th century the modern symphony and sonata emerged, as did the ballet as an independent genre. Like all the music of the baroque period, free imitative polyphony reached its high point and the culmination of its development in the works of Bach. However, at the same time, homophonic (harmonic) music, which had begun to develop earlier within polyphony and popular dances, emerged on the foundation of the same modes (major and minor) used in polyphonic music. Harmonic functions and the new melodies founded on them crystallized. A number of homophonic forms, including the rondo and the sonata, took shape at the same time as polyphonic forms such as the passacaglia, chaconne, and fugue.

Where the formation of unified nations was evolving or drawing to a close (Italy, France, England and, to some extent, Germany), a new bourgeois musical culture began to develop. Italian music retained its leading position in Europe.

In Russia polyphonic church music (in the late 17th century, part-singing and choral concerti) went through a period of revival and flowering. During the time of the Petrine reforms, secular professional music (the “panegyric” kanty) and urban everyday music (lyrical kanty and psalms) emerged.

From the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 19th the development of European music was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and later, of the French Revolution, which gave rise to new mass everyday music (marches, heroic songs such as the “Marseillaise,” and music for mass festivals and revolutionary ceremonies) and were echoed in other musical genres. Bourgeois (Enlightenment) classicism, which affirmed the ideas of reason, the equality of the people, service to society, and lofty moral ideals, dominated music. In French music, these aspirations received their highest expression in C. W. Gluck’s operas. In Austro-German music, they were reflected in the symphonic, operatic, and chamber works of representatives of the Viennese classical school—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, of whom the last most completely and profoundly embodied the heroic spirit of the struggle for the freedom and brotherhood of peoples.

Significant advances were made in all fields of professional music. Gluck and Mozart reformed the opera, endeavoring to overcome the ossified conventionality of the aristocratic serious opera (opera seria). National varieties of the democratic genre of comic opera (opera buffa) developed rapidly (G. Pergolesi in Italy; J. J. Rousseau, P. Monsigny, and A. Grétry in France; Haydn and Mozart in Austria; and V. A. Pashkevich and E. I. Fomin in Russia). The ballet became a distinct, independent genre (Gluck, Beethoven). In the compositions of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven the modern symphony (a four-movement cycle) was consolidated and received its classical embodiment; the classical grand sonata and chamber-instrumental ensemble took shape; the sonata-allegro form was worked out; and a new dialectical method of musical thought, the symphonic style, which achieved its highest flowering in the works of Beethoven, emerged.

In the music of the Slavic peoples of Russia, Poland, and Bohemia, vocal genres continued to develop (the everyday art song, and in Russia, the choral concerto, as represented by the works of M. S. Berezovskii and D. S. Bortnianskii). The first Slavic operas were composed, and the foundation was laid for the creation of the classics of national music.

In professional music throughout Europe, the polyphonic styles gave way completely to homophonic (harmonic) styles, and the functional system of harmony became fully developed.

THE 19TH CENTURY In most European countries and in North America the formation of the classical bourgeois musical culture was completed in the 19th century. It developed under the influence of the active democratization of society and of music and the surmounting of barriers between the various estates (social classes). Music, which had been confined to aristocratic salons, court theaters and chapels, and small concert halls designed for a closed circle of the privileged public, moved out into larger halls and squares to which a democratic audience had access. Many new musical theaters, concert halls, musical organizations, music publishing houses, and music education institutions, including conservatories, were established, as were music journals and newspapers. Performance finally became an independent aspect of musical activity represented by many groups and soloists. The rapid development of performance and professional composition was promoted by their becoming independent forms of music and by the tendency of 19th-century musicians to direct their work at a mass audience. At the same time, music became increasingly commercialized, despite the opposition of progressive musicians. Music played an increasing role in society and in politics. The popular democratic song and later, the workers’ revolutionary song developed. The best examples of the latter (The “Internationale,” “The Red Flag,” and “Varshavianka” [“Warszawianka”]) acquired international significance.

Young national schools of composition flourished, including the Russian school (founded by M. I. Glinka), the Polish school (F. Chopin, S. Moniuszko), the Czech school (B. Smetana, A. Dvorak), the Hungarian school (F. Erkel, F. Liszt), the Norwegian school (E. Grieg), and the Spanish school (I. Albéniz, E. Granados).

In the first half of the 19th century, romanticism was affirmed in the works of composers from a number of European countries (E. T. A. Hoffmann, C. M. von Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann in Germany and Austria, Berlioz in France, Liszt in Hungary, and Chopin in Poland). The romantics individualized and dramatized lyrics. Drawing on the songs of various peoples, they embodied national features more concretely than ever before in musical composition. They placed more emphasis on vocal music and on singing, as well as on color in harmony and orchestration, and they gave a freer treatment to traditional genres and forms and created new ones, such as the tone poem. Romantic music strove for a synthesis of music and other art forms. Program music was inspired by plots and themes from folk epos, literature, and painting. Other new forms included the instrumental miniature (prelude, musical moment, and impromptu), the programmatic cycle of miniatures, the art song and chamber-vocal cycles, and picturesque, entertaining grand operas on legendary and historical themes (the French composer G. Meyerbeer). In Italy, comic opera (G. Rossini), lyric opera (V. Bellini, G. Donizetti), and heroic opera (early works by G. Verdi) reached the peak of their development. Russian composers created national music classics that gained international importance, and original types of national historical and epic operas, as well as symphonic music based on folk themes (Glinka), took shape. The art song, which came to express features of psychological and everyday realism, flourished (A. S. Dargomyzhskii).

From the mid-19th century through the turn of the century, some European composers carried on the romantic trend in opera (Wagner), the symphony (A. Bruckner, Dvoȓáak), program music (Liszt, Grieg), and the art song (H. Wolf). Others, including Brahms, endeavored to combine the stylistic principles of romanticism and classicism. Although they all retained links with the romantic tradition, Italian opera, which reached its peak in Verdi, French opera (C. Gounod, G. Bizet, and J. Massenet) and ballet (L. Delibes), and Polish and Czech opera (Moniuszko and Smetana) began to develop styles of their own.

In the works of a number of Western European composers, including Verdi, Bizet, and Wolf, realistic tendencies became more important. They were manifested with particular clarity and on a particularly large scale in Russian music of the period, which was ideologically associated with the democratic social movement and progressive literature (later works by Dargomyzhskii; compositions by the Russian Five—M. A. Balakirev, A. P. Borodin, M. P. Mussorgsky, N. A. Rimsky- Korsakov, and C. A. Cui; and the works of P. I. Tchaikovsky). Inspired by the Russian folk song, as well as by the folk music of the Orient, Russian composers such as Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov developed new melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic means that significantly enriched the European modal system.

At the turn of the century, European music again went through a transitional period, corresponding to the rise of imperialism. The period was marked by crises in a number of ideological and stylistic currents of the preceding epoch, by tendencies toward both a revival of classical traditions and a break with them, by the loss of great social themes, and by the growth of individualism and aestheticism (modernism). In Germany and Austria the romantic symphonic style reached its culmination in the works of G. Mahler and R. Strauss, and musical expressionism was born (A. Schönberg). Other new tendencies developed, including impressionism in France (C. Debussy and M. Ravel) and verismo in Italy (the operas of P. Mascagni and R. Leoncavallo and some of G. Puccini’s). In Russia the tradition of the members of the Russian Five and Tchaikovsky were carried on and, to some degree, developed by S. I. Taneev, A. K. Glazunov, A. K. Liadov, and S. V. Rachmaninoff. At the same time, new phenomena emerged, including symbolism (A. N. Scriabin), the modernization of folk tales and of “barbarous” antiquity (early works of I. F. Stravinsky and S. S. Prokofiev). The foundations for the classics of national music were laid in the Ukraine (N. V. Lysenko, N. D. Leontovich), Georgia (Z. P. Paliashvili), Armenia (Komitas, A. A. Spendiarov), Azerbaijan (U. Gadzhi-bekov), Estonia (A. Kapp), Latvia (J. Viols), Lithuania (M. Ciurlionis), and Finland (J. Sibelius).

Classical European musical thought, which was based on major-minor harmony, underwent profound changes in the works of a number of composers. Some of them retained the principle of tonal music but expanded its base with natural (diatonic) and artificial modes (Debussy, Stravinsky) or saturated it with accidentals (Scriabin). Others completely abandoned the tonal principle and wrote atonal music (Schönberg and C. Ives, an American composer). The weakening of harmonic ties stimulated a revival of interest in polyphonic theory and composition (Taneev in Russia, M. Reger in Germany).

In mid-19th-century Western Europe a new musical theater genre, the operetta, began to develop (Hervé, J. Offenbach, C. Lecocq, R. Planquette in France; F. von Suppé, K. Mil-locker, and J. Strauss the Younger in Austria; and the Hungarians F. Lehár and I. Küálmán—all of whom were representatives of the Viennese school of operetta). In professional composing, light (everyday, or dance) music became an independent line of music. Variety stage music emerged as a separate branch of music.

THE 20TH CENTURY. At the end of the first decade of the 20th century bourgeois musical culture entered a new period of its history. Its development was strongly influenced by social factors, such as the involvement of the masses in political and social life, the growth of mass liberation movements, and the emergence of the socialist system. Scientific and technological progress—the invention of new means of communication, including motion pictures, the radio, the television, and the phonograph—also had an important effect on the development of music, the global dissemination of which became possible. In the developed capitalist countries musical activity was outwardly turbulent and often feverish, characterized by rapidly changing fashions, a kaleidoscope of artificially created sensations, and publicity.

Musical culture in the developed capitalist countries split even more clearly than ever before into two cultures: a bourgeois, elitist, pseudomass culture and a democratic one that included socialist elements. An “industry” based entirely on light music developed and earned enormous profits for its owners. Music acquired a new function, advertising. Democratic musical culture was reflected in the works of many progressive musicians who struggled for music with content and affirmed the ideas of humanism and nationality (in the sense of close ties with the people). In addition to musical theater and concert works, many songs of the revolutionary movement and antifascist struggle of the 1920’s through 1940’s (H. Eisler, the German composer), as well as the contemporary political protest song, are representative of democratic culture.

In the 20th century, composition in the capitalist countries has been distinguished by the unprecedented diversity and blending of stylistic currents. Among them are expressionism (the Viennese school of Schönberg and his pupils A. Berg and A. von Webern and the Italian L. Dallapiccola, who developed a rigidly prescribed system of atonal music, or dodecaphony) and neoclas-sicism (Stravinsky, works of the 1920’s through 1950’s; the German composer P. Hindemith; and the Italians O. Respighi, G. F. Malipiero, and A. Casella). Although other composers were influenced by these currents, they were also able to overcome their limitations because of their ties with democratic and realistic tendencies of the period and with folk creativity. (Among these composers were B. Bartók and Z. Kodály of Hungary; A. Honegger, F. Poulenc, and D. Milhaud of France; C. Orff of Germany; K. Szymanowski of Poland; L. Janček and B. Martinü of Czechoslovakia; G. Enesco of Rumania; and B. Britten of Great Britain.)

Various currents known as the avant-garde emerged in the 1950’s. Among the most representative avant-garde composers are K. Stockhausen of the Federal Republic of Germany, P. Boulez and I. Xenakis of France, J. Cage of the USA, and L. Nono and L. Berio of Italy.) Breaking completely with classical traditions, they concentrated on the development of musique concrte (tape recordings of noises), electronic music (tape recordings of artificially produced nonmusical sounds), sound music (tape recordings of uncoordinated musical sounds of unusual timbres), and chance music, or indeterminacy (the haphazard or chance combination of individual sounds or of sections of a musical form). Avant-gardism, as a rule, expresses the mood of petit bourgeois individualism, anarchism, or political indifference.

Internationally, 20th-century music has been characterized by the revival and intensive growth of the musical cultures of the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and their interaction and rapprochement with European cultures. On the one hand, these trends have been accompanied by an intense struggle of progressive musicians against the leveling influences of the Western European and North American elitist and pseudomass music, which is infected with cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, progressives have had to fight reactionary tendencies favoring the preservation of national cultures in an unshakeable form. For the cultures of the developing countries the socialist countries serve as an example of how to solve the problem of combining the national and the international in music.

After the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution a new musical culture—a socialist one, different in principle from its predecessor—developed in Russia. Socialist musical culture took shape after World War II in several other countries that had embarked on socialist construction. A consistently democratic, popular character distinguishes socialist musical culture from other musical cultures. In the socialist countries an extensive network of music institutions and opera and concert groups accessible to everyone has been established. In interaction with professional art, composing and performing have developed on a mass scale in the form of folk amateur activity. All nations and peoples, including those who once had no written musical culture, have been given the opportunity to discover and develop completely the original features of their folk music and, at the same time, to share the finest achievements of international professional art and to master genres such as the opera, ballet, symphony, and oratorio. National musical cultures have interacted, exchanging personnel as well as creative ideas and achievements. This has promoted closer relations between various cultures.

Soviet music has played a leading role in 20th-century music, producing many outstanding composers, including the Russians N. Ia. Miaskovskii, Iu. A. Shaporin, S. S. Prokofiev, V. Ia. Shebalin, D. B. Kabalevsky, D. D. Shostakovich, T. N. Khrennikov, G. V. Sviridov, and R. K. Shchedrin; the Tatar N. Zhiganov; the Dagestanis G. Gasanov and Sh. Chalaev; the Ukrainians L. N. Revutskii and B. N. Liatoshinskii; and the Byelorussians E. K. Tikotskii and A. V. Bogatyrev. Other distinguished Soviet composers are the Georgians Sh. M. Mshvelidze, A. M. Balanchivadze, A. D. Machavariani, and O. V. Taktakishvili; the Armenians A. I. Khachaturian, A. G. Arutiunian, A. A. Babadzhanian, and E. M. Mirzoian; the Azerbaijanis K. Karaev and F. Amirov; the Kazakhs E. G. Brusilovskii and M. Tulebaev; the Uzbek M. Burkhanov; and the Turkmen V. Mukhatov. The Estonians E. Kapp, G. Ernesaks, and E. Tamberg, the Latvians J. Ivanovs and M. Zarin, and the Lithuanians B. Dvarionas and E. Balsis are outstanding contemporary Soviet composers. Soviet music has produced great performers, including E. A. Mravinskii, E. F. Svetlanov, G. N. Rozhdestvenskii, A. V. Sveshnikov, A. A. Iurlov, K. N. Igumnov, V. V. Sofronitskii, S. T. Rikhter, E. G. Gilel’s, D. F. Oistrakh, L. B. Kogan, M. L. Rostropovich, L. V. Sobinov, A. V. Nezhdanova, N. A. Obukhova, A. S. Pirogov, I. S. Kozlovskii, S. Ia. Lemeshev, and Z. A. Dolukhanova. B. V. Asaf’-ev, A. V. Ossovskii, and I. I. Sollertinskii are among the Soviet Union’s most distinguished musicologists.

The principles of partiinost’ (party spirit) and narodnost’ (close ties with the people) and the method of socialist realism are the ideological and aesthetic foundation of Soviet music. Many traditional musical genres have been revitalized. Opera, the ballet, and the symphony have retained their classic, grand, monumental form, which, to a large extent, has been lost in the West. Internally, however, they have been reconstructed under the influence of the themes inspired by the revolution and contemporary life. Choral and vocal-symphonic music (oratorios, cantatas, and poems) based on historical revolutionary and popular patriotic themes have flourished. Soviet poetry, as well as classical and folk poetry, has contributed to the enrichment of the art song. Mass and everyday songs have become a new genre for professional composers, including A. V. Aleksandrov, A. G. Novikov, A. A. Davidenko, Dm. Ia. Pokrass, I. O. Dunaevskii, V. G. Zakharov, M. I. Blanter, V. P. Solov’ev-Sedoi, V. I. Muradeli, B. A. Mokrousov, A. I. Ostrovskii, A. N. Pakh-mutova, and A. P. Petrov. Songs have played a major role in the life and struggle of the popular masses and have exerted a very powerful influence on other genres of music. The folklore traditions of all peoples of the USSR have been reconstructed and developed. At the same time, socialist content has made it possible to enrich and transform national music styles with many new inflections and other expressive means.

Considerable success in creating a new musical culture has also been achieved in the other socialist countries, whose outstanding composers include H. Eisler and P. Dessau (the German Democratic Republic), W. Lutoslawski (Poland), P. Vladigerov and L. Pipkov (Bulgaria), Z. Kodály and F. Szabó (Hungary), and V. Dobiáŝ and E. Sucho (Czechoslovakia).

Soviet music, which is distinguished by a diversity of forms, genres, and expressive means, has in its development drawn on the rich heritage of folk music and the musical classics of the peoples of the USSR. Many types of folk music preserved in the Soviet Union have deep roots. With the passage of time, folk music developed and underwent changes as new historical conditions emerged. Many of the ritual, work, and epic songs of such peoples as the Russians, Armenians, Georgians, and Uzbeks are ancient. The music of the peoples of the USSR is performed on an unusually rich variety of instruments.

In the musical culture of each people, a distinctive national folk music gradually developed. For all the diversity of its forms and types, however, the multinational art of the USSR is unified in certain respects owing to the common history of the peoples of the USSR, whose prolonged struggle for independence and against foreign oppression found reflection in heroic epics and historical songs that were imbued with patriotic ardor and a yearning for liberty.

The professional music of many peoples of the USSR also has very old traditions. In Georgia and Armenia various forms of liturgical singing originated in the fourth century, for which a special system of notation was developed in the eighth and ninth centuries. Information on the forms of secular music-making is provided in the Armenian epic David of Sasun (tenth century) and in the narrative poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin (12th century), by the Georgian poet S. Rustaveli. Musical art attained a high level of development in Kievan Rus’ (ninth to 12th centuries), which gave birth to the cultures of three fraternal Slavic peoples—Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians. Also dating from this period are the earliest examples of Russian musical notation, the znamennyi notation, which made use of neumes (znamena, or kruiki) to record liturgical melodies.

The bearers of the secular musical tradition in Rus’ were, in addition to the singer-storytellers, the skomorokhi (itinerant performers), whose art enjoyed great popularity and was loved by the people, despite persecution by the church. As late as the October Revolution of 1917, many peoples of the USSR had no written music; the development of their musical art was entirely dependent on oral tradition. In the professional music of some peoples, which was transmitted orally, vocal and instrumental works in several movements were created; the makom (maqam) among the Tadzhiks and Uzbeks and the mugam among the Azerbaijanis. In the 16th century emerged the Middle Asian shashmakom, a cycle comprising six makoms. At the turn of the 18th century there was an upsurge in the art of professional folk musicians—ashugis—in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Russian national school of composition began forming in the last third of the 18th century, when classical music was freed from the authority of the church and attained great social importance. The creative work of such composers as M. S. Berezovskii, D. S. Bortnianskii, E. I. Fomin, I. E.Khandoshkin, and V. A. Pashkevich developed in tandem with the progressive Russian culture of the period. In their operas, instrumental compositions, and choral works these composers drew their subject matter from the life of the people to present a truthful picture of reality; they made use of folk song melodies, which they adapted.

A major role in cultural life was played by the serf theaters of such families as the Sheremetevs and Vorontsovs, where operas and ballets were staged. In 1776, Prince P. V. Urusov and the impresario M. G. Medoks organized the company of the Russian Theater, which in 1780 took up residence at the Petrovskii Theater; dramas, operas, and ballets were all performed by the same company. From these beginnings evolved the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR. In St. Petersburg, musical productions were first staged in 1783 in the Kamennyi (Bol’shoi) Theater, which eventually became the Leningrad Theater of Opera and Ballet.

Russian music of the 19th century, which reflected the growth of the country’s emancipation movement, was characterized by a clear democratic orientation, by a profound realism, by a multivarious content, by images and a musical idiom that were rooted in the life of the people, and by formal perfection. The founder of classical Russian music, M. I. Glinka, composed operas, symphonies, and vocal chamber works that are at once unmistakably national and among the crowning achievements of world music. Such works as the operas Ivan Susanin and Ruslan and Liudmila and the orchestral fantasy Kamarinskaia are outstanding in their realism, profundity of content, and artistic mastery. In his opera Rusalka (The Mermaid; after Pushkin), A. S. Dargomyzhskii dealt with the topic of social inequality in a drama of the common people.

In the second half of the 19th century Russian music attained depth and power in the depiction of reality, as well as richness of form and expressive means, in the work of P. I. Tchaikovsky and the members of the Russian Five, notably M. P. Mussorgsky, A. P. Borodin, and N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. Their works sounded an impassioned protest against the oppression of the people, the violence done to the human personality, and the lack of rights in tsarist Russia and expressed faith in the strength of the people and in a shining future. The Russian people’s love of liberty is reflected in such historical operas as Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Borodin’s Prince Igor. The poetry of Russian fairy tales was skillfully conveyed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden. Tchaikovsky, in his opera The Queen of Spades and his Symphony No. 6, scaled new dramatic heights in the depiction of man’s spiritual life. The early 20th-century composers A. N. Scriabin and S. V. Rachmaninoff vividly communicated the turbulent atmosphere of the prerevolutionary years.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, national schools of music, whose formation and development were influenced by the Russian musical classics, arose among a number of peoples. Common to all the national schools was a desire to depict truthfully the life of the people and to develop its distinctive musical principles. In Ukrainian music, a major role was played by N. V. Lysenko, whose compositions included operas, notably Taras Bulba (after Gogol), and choral works; Lysenko was a brilliant researcher and propagandist of folk music, a teacher, and a public figure in the music world.

M. A. Balanchivadze and Z. P. Paliashvili composed the first Georgian operas, turning to national historical legends for their subject matter; they made extensive use of the expressive means and the forms of Georgian folk music. Paliashvili’s opera Abesalom and Eteri attained the status of a classic. In Armenia, Komitas (S. G. Sogomonian) laid the foundations for the Armenian school of composition with his arrangements of folk songs; A. T. Tigranian composed the first Armenian opera, Anush. In Azerbaijan, the first Azerbaijani operas, by U. Gadzhibekov, were staged; they were based on the traditional forms of folk music. A group of prominent composers who contributed to the formation of national schools of composition advanced the musical art of Latvia (J. Juriānu, J. Vītols, and E. Dārziņš), Estonia (R. Tobias and A. Kapp), and Lithuania (M. Petrauskas and M. Čiurlionis). Many of these composers were the students, and subsequently the friends and colleagues, of the outstanding masters of Russian music.

The great Russian composers, for their part, turned to the musical folklore of the fraternal peoples, thereby enriching their own creative work. They drew on subject matter from the life of the various peoples and made use of the melodies, rhythms, and expressive means of folk music. The images of Ukrainian folk art were transcribed with great artistry and truthfulness in the works of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Glinka, M. A. Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and A. G. Rubinstein carefully studied the music of the Transcaucasian and Middle Asian peoples, whose elements they developed in their operas and symphonies. Also important were the practical activities of prominent progressive Russian musical figures in non-Russian cultural centers. M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov, for example, who was in Tbilisi from 1882 to 1893, contributed to the development of the musical culture of Georgia and to the strengthening of friendly ties between Russian and Georgian musical figures.

The art of musical performance flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. International recognition was gained by the Russian school of piano, represented by such pianists as Rubinstein, A. N. Esipova, and Rachmaninoff; the Russian school of cello playing, represented by such cellists as K. Iu. Davydov, A. A. Brandukov, and A. V. Verzhbilovich; the Russian school of the violin, represented by such violinists as N. D. Dmitriev-Svechin, L. S. Auer, I. V. Grzhimali, and V. V. Bezekirskii; and the Russian school of voice, represented by such singers as O. A. Petrov, F. I. Stravinskii, F. I. Chaliapin, L. V. Sobinov, and A. V. Nezhdanova. Because the political structure of prerevolutionary Russia imposed a heavy yoke on the various nationalities of the Russian Empire, however, the musical art of most peoples could not develop freely.