Abstract:
The article is devoted to the research of choral music by
Samuel Barber who was a 20th-century American composer. The research
is carried out in terms of its genre and style diversity. It represents the
historical stages of turning to choral art. The compositions are
differentiated by voice composition into a cappella choirs and choirs with
instrumental accompaniment. The orchestral scores are analyzed through
the interaction of the poetic text and musical intonation taken into
consideration. The figurative and semantic shades of religious and secular
origin poems are discovered, the relationship between the music and
ancient genres is revealed: Gregorian monodies, antiphons, plain chants,
motets, madrigals, Easter hymns. The substantive music aspects are
researched as projected on the historical genesis and synthesis of stylistic
phenomena of different nature. It is researched how much the elements of
medieval, renaissance, baroque, romantic and modern musical vocabulary
influence the integral system of choral composition artistic means.
