Musical Intonation: Genre and Style Properties

Abstract

In the previous lecture from the cycle “Musical Intonation” (see the journal ICONI, 2021, No. 3, pp. 68–83) the topic was the conception of musical intonation, its sound contours and semantics. In the present publication there appears the possibility to characterize the other features of intonation which enable it to move towards the achievement of its main goal — conveyance of the artistic meaning. During the course of the conversation about the genre-related particularities of intonation four large-scale genre-related spheres have been indicated (and, correspondingly, four genre types): melodiousness, declamatory features, motoric features and instrumental features. The view of musical intonation in the stylistic perspective is correlated with the nuanced concept of style as the contingence of artistic content with the means of its manifestation. In correspondence with the different “sections” of the existent massif of music, the styles of composers, composers’ schools, social groups, national cultures, continental cultures, eras and artistic directions (trends) develop themselves. They all fixate themselves more or less self-evidently in musical intonation.
In musical intonation the features of different genre-related spheres interact with each other by various means (forming poly-genre) and the features of various styles combine together (creating poly-stylistics).
The conclusive lecture will be devoted to a discussion of the aesthetical and dramaturgical features of musical intonation, and also about how intonation exists in the historical-culturological context.