The image of human and the world in contemporary music: anthropological dimensions of Ukrainian composers' works in the socio-cultural continuum

Abstract

Based on the principles of historical and systemic approaches and methods of hermeneutical and philosophical anthropological analysis, the author of the article aims to identify the peculiarities of the content of the world model and the model of a human in Ukrainian music of the last third of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in comparison with Western European music and to characterize the composer's vision of the world order in the time of open Russian aggression in Ukraine. The research methodology is based on systemic and historical approaches that allow us to consider a single musical text as a subsystem of a higher-order system, taking into account its socio-cultural context. The scientific novelty of the study is to identify the specifics of the artistic outlook of Ukrainian artists of the last third of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is the result of studying their work in the anthropological dimension. Conclusions. The anthropological essence of the music of contemporary Ukrainian composers lies in a certain non-contradictory polarity, when an ironic and fragmentary worldview is organically combined with religious search; awareness of chaos and apocalyptic culture – with an attempt to find support in religion in its various variants. That is why the hero in contemporary music has a dual essence: he is both a marginalized person and at the same time a person with a strong spiritual foundation. This polarity is caused by the crisis mentality of the modern post-totalitarian society.  The specificity of the content of Ukrainian wartime music is that in the first year of the war, composers sought to directly embody the reaction to the atrocities they saw, which manifested itself in the increased expressiveness of the expression, and in 2023 we can already observe attempts to philosophically comprehend the topic of the confrontation between good and evil, the formation of a systemic view of the world in times of war, in which there is a place for different feelings and different areas of private life.