Choral music by Samuel Barber: genre and style aspects

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.