International Music Resources by Country: Ukraine

Figure 3

The most famous and influential work of Nikolay Diletsky (c. 1630-80) is Grammatika musikiyskago peniya (‘A grammar of musical singing’), a treatise on composition with three surviving versions from between 1677-79. The text was aimed at both beginning and advanced students and used traditional solmization and hexachordal terminology and constructs to introduce the fundamentals of music. The author covers both sacred and secular music, focusing particularly on the imitative polyphonic texture of the genre known as the kontsert, an a cappella style created by means of a subtle interplay among contrasting elements such as rhythm, meter, and texture, and unified by interwoven melodic and harmonic material. Diletsky’s examples include both vocal and instrumental pieces and his rules are meant to apply to all kinds of music. 

One of his constructs is called a musical circle; here he uses a circular staff to present a melody as it passes through each of the major or minor keys at the interval of a fifth. He uses solmization syllables to mark the progression of the melody and advises students to consult an experienced organist if they encounter any difficulties. This is the first circle of fifths to appear in a theoretical treatise, antedating Western examples by several decades. (Jensen and Vorob’yov)

Resurrection Canon. Sung by the Moscow Choral Academy Choir

Figure 5

A composer of German and Polish decent, Reinhold Glière (1875-1956) was born in Kyiv and taught composition at the Conservatory there from 1913-1920. He taught many important Russian composers throughout his life including Nikolai Myaskovsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian and Alexander Mosolov. Following in the Russian Romantic tradition, the most important element in Glière's style is expressive melody. In his symphonic works he drew above all on the Russian epic tradition, that of Borodin and Glazunov. This is especially clear in his Third Symphony ‘Il′ya Muromets’, named after a Slavic folk hero, but all his symphonies, concertos and symphonic poems show a monumentality of image and a brilliant aural imagination. (Grigor′yeva)

Symphony No. 3 "Il'ya Muromets". Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta

Figure 6

Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020) a composer, was born in Horlivka, Ukraine

Kapustin's work largely belongs to the ‘third stream’, a stylistic trend associated with experiments to synthesize jazz and Russian classical music. The aesthetics of his music very much synthesize Russian harmony with jazz, all packaged in traditional forms such as the Sonata or Concerto. In the works he wrote during the 1960s there was a perceptible attempt to interpret the traditions of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and A. Tsfasman, on the one hand, and Russian piano music, on the other (First Piano Concerto and various piano pieces). In the 1970s the composer focussed his investigations on the fusion style based on an amalgamation of elements of jazz and rock, European formal music and non-European folklore. His works were largely unknown in the West for many years. (Grigor′yeva)

Duet Op. 99 for Cello and Alto Saxophone. Peter Lehel, saxophone and Christine Rauh, cello