The published material opens with a cycle of lectures titled “Musical Intonation.” The first of them illuminates such theoretical issues as the concept of intonation, the means of its sound design (the constructive — the motive, phrase, consonance, sound; the textural — in monophony and polyphony), and its semantics. Demonstration is made of “objectivity,” manifested by intonation (the figurative spheres of the Human Being, World, Music). It is discovered that the spheres of expressiveness are “modeled” in intonation as such or in various combinations. Thus, the semantic core of a larger component of musical content is formed — the musical image. The existence of musical intonation in an artistic opus is mobile, which makes it possible to characterize it as a poly-semantic and polymorphic phenomenon. The subsequent lectures will demonstrate such aspects of musical intonation as its genre-related and stylistic properties, its aesthetic and dramatic features, as well as its ability to exist in a historical and cultural context.

In the previous lectures, which made up the cycle “Classics of Russian Music of the 20th Century”, the works of Sergei Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Georgy Sviridov, Rodion Shchedrin and Alfred Schnittke were examined. Let us supplement this panorama with two final lectures: the first is intended to extend the range of composers’ names, the second will be devoted to an overview of 20th century music with an outlet into the universal space. As it is well-known, since the time of Peter the Great, who established St. Petersburg, two capitals coexisted in Russia, each of which possessed its own face and style, among other things, in the creation of music. By the end of the 19th century, two compositional schools had developed: the St. Petersburg school, the core of which was the “Mighty Handful”, and the Moscow school, headed by Piotr Tchaikovsky. During the 20th century, these schools continued their fruitful interaction. Among the names presented in the main sections of my lectures, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Shostakovich, Sviridov began their activities in St. Petersburg- Petrograd-Leningrad, and later they became Muscovites (except for Stravinsky, who lived abroad from the early 1910s). In the second half of the 20th century, the leaders of the musical process in Russia were the Moscow composers Rodion Shchedrin and Alfred Schnittke, along with whom many other names can be mentioned, including Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Vladimir Martynov. Representatives of the Leningrad school continued to make a significant contribution to the treasury of Russian music. The following short overviews of the works of Sergei Slonimsky and Valery Gavrilin will testify to this. In addition to the two capitals, composers from a number of other cities in Russia, primarily, those with conservatories, have worked tirelessly in the field of the art of music, which has significantly expanded the scale of the panorama of the musical art in our country — the creative heritage of Elena Gokhman is cited as a characteristic example.

During the course of many centuries the problem of the impact of music on human beings has aroused interest in philosophers and thinkers, generating numerous theories and conceptions. A serious stage of development of musical therapy occurred in the Baroque era. During that period for the fi rst time scholars made the attempt to provide a systematization of the means of musical expressivity according to the principle of their perception, while the musical compositions created during that period are also broadly used in present-day musical therapy. Baroque instrumental music taken as a principle for the method of the directed fi gurative perception is seminal for working with elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease. Figurative perception and directed apprehension of music are traditionally considered to be the initial stage of a group psychotherapeutic process and is used for preparation of the participants for a session of psychodrama. On the basis of existing systems (those of Helen Bonny and Joseph Moreno) the author of the article developed an independent methodology, the aim of which is to establish and expand verbal communication with patients at an intermediate (moderate) stage of the Alzheimer disease. In addition to the main goals the achievement of which is pursued by activities in directed fi gurative perception, the music chosen in consideration of the patient’s individual characteristic features arouses a therapeutic impact on him, being conducive to the rehabilitation of personal memories and the optimization of the human being’s psycho-emotional state.

The lecture “Music, Mathematics and Computer Science” is subdivided into two parts. The fi rst part, “Music, Mathematics and Computer Science: History of Interaction” (see ICONI journal, No. 3, 2020) examines the processes of interconnection and interpenetration of various fi elds of music, mathematics and computer science, spanning the period from Ancient Times to the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The second part of the lecture: “Music, Mathematics and Computer Science: Particular Features of Functioning of Computer-Musical Technologies” is devoted to examining various aspects of developing and applying computer-musical technologies in contemporary musical practice, including musical composition, performance and the sphere of music education

In this article author recounts how he became a composer, who were his teachers, what educational institutions he studied in, where he worked, how he developed his individual musical style and his ideas about music, and also describes what these ideas are. He also describes the context of living and working in New York City and the musical organizations he has worked with and for from the late 1960s to the present.

Among the Russian composers of the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries a special position is held by the sacred choral works of Vassily Titov (ca. 1650 — ca. 1715), one of the bright representatives of the polyphonic part singing, in which the originality of the Russian Baroque musical culture. The music of Vassily Titov, an outstanding master of choral writing, is diverse in terms of its genres, it comprises nearly two hundred compositions, many of which predominated in the church music repertoire of Russian churches during the course of the 18th century. A study of Vassily Titov’s choral works has made it possible to disclose the characteristic features of the composer’s polyphonic style. The latter include the multi-choral presentation with its bright spatial effects, the antiphonic juxtapositions of large choral masses, the principles of concertizing based on the succession of solo voices and tutti, on the juxtaposition of the chordal-harmonic and the polyphonic exposition, as well as the skillful mastery of imitational counterpoint, up to polyphonic variation. Features of national originality reveal themselves most vividly in the musical thematicism of the compositions, where along with the ornamental design of the intertwining melodic lines and turns of an instrumental type, use is made of intonations of folk songs, cants and church chants. In his musical oeuvres Vassily Titov revised and reevaluated the basic characteristic traits and forms of Western European Baroque music in correspondence with the particularities of Russian musical culture, thereby preserving and enriching the traditions of the Russian national style.

Benjamin (Ben) Bagby is one of the world’s distinguished medievalists, and is particularly well-known for his scholarly, yet passionate performances of the music of the medieval epoch — both with the ensemble Sequentia, which he co-founded, and as a soloist. In the fi eld of solo performance he is renowned for bringing to life the important Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf — presenting it, as far as contemporary scholarship and vivid artistic imagination can allow, in an authentic “bardic” manner. This wide-ranging interview has much discussion of his career in both regards, as well as his experience as a professor at the Sorbonne. Readers who may wish, after reading this interview, to know more about this important musician and scholar can visit these two websites: www.BagbyBeowulf.com / www.Sequentia.org

The article is devoted to the study of the cultural trace of the Vasnetsov family on the Kuban land, represented by artists (Yury A. Vasnetsov, Elizaveta Yu. Vasnetsova), career soldiers (Nikolai A. Kuznetsov) and teachers (Elena N. Shcherbakova). Based on publications, archival materials stored in the fund of the Krasnodar F. Kovalenko Regional Art Museum, as well as their own findings, the authors restore the once-forgotten connections of the famous name with the city of Yekaterinodar (presently Krasnodar).

The article is devoted to Dutch art — the Leiden School in Holland in the 17th century. The author analyzes the defi nition, particularities and the theoretic foundations of the characteristics and the artistic legacy of the painters — the representatives of the Leiden school and also demonstrates the close connection between naturalism and the particularities of the paintings of the school’s adherents and the uniqueness of the works by such masters as Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder.

A characteristic feature of the theater of the Post-Classical Era, which has lasted from the early 20th century up to the present time, is the interpenetration of elements pertaining to different art forms in the course of a ceaseless search for forms and means of impact on the audience. The interaction between ballet and drama theater leads to the result that one of the genres is enriched by the scenographic solutions of the other. From a broad spectrum of examples, it is possible to highlight a number of techniques characteristic for both the dramatic and the ballet stage. In the present work such scenographic techniques are determined and described as the changes of the parameters of the stage by means of a curtain system, the use of a curtain as a full-fledged member of the action, simultaneity (the simultaneous demonstration of several different places of action in one scene), the multi-leveledness of the stage space, adaptation for the cinema (use of elements of cinema, video-recording or the technique of “recording in real time” in the performance), as well as the change of decorations occurring in front of the viewer’s eyes.