“HALYCHIAN SUITE” BY MYKOLA DREMLIUHA – THE UNKNOWN BEGINNING OF HIS CHORAL WORKS

Abstract

The proposed paper analyzes one of Mykola Dremliuha’s first works, composed during his student years – the choral cycle “Halychian Suite”. The cycle consists of four arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs, combined on the principle of contrast. At one time, M. Dremliuha’s teacher Levko Revutskyi recommended the suite for performance, but we do not have any facts of its concert performance. Until now, the “Halychian Suite” was kept in manuscript form in the personal archive of the composer’s daughter Maria Dremliuha, and currently, it is being prepared for publication. The suite manuscript became the basic material for the research that relied on the method of musicological analysis. Besides, historical-cultural, biographical and interview methods were used. In the course of the research, it was established that the “Halychian Suite”, composed at the beginning of M. Dremliuha’s creative career, is a valuable choral cycle from an artistic point of view, which demonstrates the talented embodiment of arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs in the form of a suite. The young composer applied a system of expressive means corresponding to each of the arrangements for the original embodiment of his creative idea, continuing the traditions of his predecessors M. Lysenko, M. Leontovych, and L. Revutskyi. We can state that while coposing the suite, M. Dremliuha honed his choral writing skills, experimented with the colors of the choral palette (harmonic, tonal, timbral, textural, etc.) and, eventually, created a beautiful, coherent composition, which will be interesting in its musical language both for performers and listeners. In this early choral piece, the features of the composer’s creative manner were already reflected: a desire for cyclical musical structure, a folk song intonation basis, a well-thought-out sound support of choral voices, an impressionistic glint of harmonic and tonal colors. The introduction of the “Halychian Suite” into scientific discourse is important for a comprehensive study of M. Dremliuha’s choral works and his musical heritage in general, as well as for understanding the ways of development of Ukrainian musical art of the first half of the 20th century.