History of the Ukrainian Music Pedagogy: Viennese Meetings

Abstract

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.28925/2518-766X.2019.4.8

The article substantiates the features of the history of musical pedagogy as meta-history, the content of which is immutable values, spiritual constants of mankind, as well as such phenomena as coincidence, meetings in time and space, their sign and symbolic interpretation.
Along with people, cities are important participants in the complex drama of the Ukrainian history. They are spiritual and cultural centers important for the development of national culture and education. Many of them received symbolic names, for instance, Second Jerusalem (Kyiv), Chernihiv Athens, Galician Piedmont (Lviv, Galicia in general). Among the Western European cities, which have a leading role in the drama of national history and culture there is Vienna, “the golden apple of Europe”, a metropolis, at different times the political and artistic capital of Europe, and for many Ukrainians the juridical capital. Vienna holds the mission of the world’s city, which has summed up the experience of history and has become a stage of human drama, drama of events and nations.
The cultural archetypes of Vienna, which finally determined the direction of further development of the European musical culture, include the works of “Viennese classics”, the era of Biedermeier, “Viennese waltz”, “Viennese secession”. Many significant events, real and symbolic meetings in the history of Ukrainian culture took place in Vienna. It was the Austrian capital, where a considerable part of the scientific and creative elite of Ukraine obtained European education. This was the place where the fighters for the Ukrainian statehood found political protection.
The article briefly describes the activities of “the Ukrainian Viennese” Eusebius Mandychevsky and Serhiy Bortkevich, two artists, musicians, heroes of the national historical drama, representatives of different generations and regions, united by the time and space of the Ukrainian history and culture, whose life reflected the tragic fate of the people, took place transformation of the history into person’s destiny.
The meta-history approach substantially expands and enhances the possibilities of traditional methodology. Sign and symbolic comprehension of the past requires highlighting spiritually significant processes in the development of history, their contrast, comparison, reading the “text” of historical events, the discovery of its “subtext”, which is “the semantic and vital awareness of being”.