Unknown pages of Ihor Shamo's choral work

Section 2. Music space of Ukraine

Abstract

Statement of the problem. On February 21, 2025, the artistic community of Ukraine celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Ukrainian composer Ihor Naumovich Shamo (1925–1982). The artist’s legacy is significant in volume and diverse in genres: symphonies, opera, cantatas, oratorio- concert, choral, vocal and piano cycles, film music and over 300 songs, among them the visiting card of the capital of the Ukrainian state – “Kyiv Waltz”. Ihor Shamo’s choral legacy includes the only cycle for male a cappella ensemble –“The Harvest Triptych”, which has survived in manuscript and has not received either a performance or a research interpretation to this day. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of this study is to carry out a holistic analysis of the little-known choral cycle “The Harvest Triptych” by I. Shamo. For the first time, an analytical understanding of I. Shamo’s work has been carried out to involve it in performing practice, which determines the novelty of the study. If the historiographical method was chosen to work out the research idea regarding the composer’s choral work, then the textological method was chosen to study the facsimile manuscript of the “Harvester Triptych” itself; genre, structural-functional and intonation-dramaturgical types of analysis were used in the study of the musical text by I. Shamo. Research results and conclusion. The results of the analysis of I. Shamo’s “Harvest Triptych” indicate that it was this choral cycle that became the harbinger of innovative shifts in the composer’s work, which were clearly manifested in the artist’s subsequent opuses – the a cappella choral opera “Yatran Games” and the cycle “10 Choirs on verses by Ukrainian poets”. Fruitful cooperation with the poet V. Yukhymovych on the “Harvest Triptych” led to his selection as the librettist of the “Yatran Games”, because the works of this talented poet, turning the folklore origins, surprisingly subtly reveal the mentality of the Ukrainian people. Shamo’s “Harvest Triptych”, created after the writing “Four a cappella choirs on I. Franko’s verses”, the cycle “The Cranes are flying” and the “Carpathian Suite”, affirms cyclicality as one of the stylistic features of the composer’s choral work and demonstrates a poly-stylistic orientation. The traditional list of performers (male choir) and the polyphonic (up to eight voices) choral texture are combined with the use of non-third chord structures, techniques of sound painting, ostinato, montage dramaturgy, and controlled aleatorism. Thus, it is I. Shamo’s “Harvest Triptych” that testifies to the composer’s assimilating the aleatoric and sonorous writing, as well as to the continuation of creative searches in the areas of vocal technique, choral instrumentation, texture (poly-layering and other), and sound painting.