Vocal music of the 20th–21st centuries, which includes works for voice or a cappella voices and also involves instruments in various timbre options, presents a large number of ways that composers utilised to work with a verbal text: from subjecting the sound series to verbal and composers’ effort to be as convex as possible to present the word—to the word being completely dissolved in the sound. In accordance with such a diversity of creative practice in scientific research in the last century and in present times, approaches to analysis of vocal music developed and continue develop, being adequate to the methods of working with a verbal primary source drawn in by composers.
Innovations in vocal music in the field of verbal series lie in the fact that the verbal component itself changes. While until the early 20th century liturgical, art poetic and prose texts were mainly chosen as the basis of the verbal series in vocal works, in contrast in the 20th–21st centuries newspaper ads, philosophical treatises, scientific works, historical documents, political slogans, manifestos, household phrases could be employed. Polylingual use and utilization of sets of individual phonemes have become quite widespread.
Scientific studies devoted to various aspects of relationship between words and music in a vocal work demonstrated that two approaches are dominant: semantic and structural. When using the semantic approach to analyse a vocal work, the emphasis is mainly made on interpretation of the content of the verbal text by means of musical expressiveness. The structural approach focuses on changes in the structure of the verbal series. In the presented dissertation, the structural approach was chosen as the main one, which aims to determine the causes and methods of changes in the verbal series employed by a composer in the vocal work. Accordingly, it is suggested to involve linguistic positions in the analysis of the verbal text, particularly the concept of linguistic levels.
Essential elements that make up the structure of language are phonological, morphological, lexical-semantic and syntactic. Each structural level has its own basic element that performs leading functions. In particular, at the phonological level, it is the phoneme, perceived as the smallest language element (perceptual function). Due to any change of a phoneme, other levels will be modified, for example, morphological or lexical-semantic (signifying function). At the next level—morphological—the morpheme is the basic unit. It performs a semasiological function, that is, the ability to express concepts. The lexical-semantic level is represented by a lexeme that names phenomena, objects, states, and so on—that is, it has a nominative function. The syntactic level of the language structure is represented by the element defined as sentence. Its main function is to convey content. It is presumed that in a vocal work a composer can work with the verbal component at the specified four levels of language.
The second section of the dissertation is devoted to the practical implementation of the expressed hypothesis, which presents a study of composers' ways of working with verbal series. The concept of language levels is used as an analytical tool. The analysis of each work was carried out in accordance with the commonly used methodology, which includes the following positions:
— analysis of the verbal component according to methods common in linguistics;
—identification of the language level with which a composer worked;
— characteristic of a composer's way of working with the verbal component in accordance with the specifics of the musical material.
Four subsections of the second section present the works written by Ukrainian authors over a period of thirty-three years: from 1985 to 2018. The principle of selecting opus was based on genre—only ensembles and a cappella choirs, because limiting themselves only to the use of a human voice, composers are in search of the sounds they need, arising as a result of various ways of working with words. This thesis was proven by the proposed analytical essays, which demonstrate various approaches to interpreting the verbal primary source.
