Sacred poetics in the context of musical postminimalism (based on the example of the works of John Tavener and Henryk Gorecki)

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, a tendency towards a broader semantic content of the techniques and principles that had developed in American classical minimalism has emerged in the works of a number of European composers. In particular, minimalist compositional aesthetics was embodied in music with religious content. The creation of modern spiritual works is often associated with the development and transformation in a new artistic and aesthetic space of lexical and structural models of cult vocal genres of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which gives grounds to speak of sacred poetics that developed within the framework of musical postminimalism. The proposed article examines this perspective religious choral works by the greatest representatives of European postminimalism, John Tavener and Henryk Górecki, who, in search of sacred meanings and new simplicity of musical intonation, turn to the tradition of liturgical singing of the Christian Middle Ages. The composers are united by their appeal to archaic intonational vocabulary and reliance on the repetitive-ostinato principle of developing thematic material in combination with variability. However, different genre and style guidelines – Orthodox line singing in Tavener and Gregorian polyphony in Górecki, as well as the use of various techniques for transforming the original structural elements and methods of organizing the whole reveal individual authorial methods of implementing a minimalist composition.