Natalia Kononenko

Thanks to the development of information technologies during the last decades of the XXth century practically the whole sound genofond of a planet has became accessible. The propagation of local cultural practices showed for cinematic realization many unexplored sound worlds. As a result interaction of geographical areas within the art concept of film became one of the central themes of cinematographical work with sound matter. In this sense the problem of transformative dialogue of Occident and Orient, given by Tarkovsky’s films, becomes the starting point of thinking for many authors. But if Tarkovsky explores the problem in the context of the idea of personal spiritual evolution and painful collapse at the boundary of the Worlds (at a very moment of their mutual absorption), in Sokurov's films the same theme arises in the frame of transsentimental aesthetics, interpreting cultural interrelations of Occident and Orient as a mutual sounding inside a solvent global context.
The paper is dedicated to a particular artistic strategies of A. Tarkovsky and A. Sokurov — their individual conceptions of convergence geographically separated musical worlds — as well as to the conditionality of these strategies by the historical and cultural contexts.

The paper discusses semantic reconsiderations of Bach’s aria “Erbarme Dich” (no. 47 from St Matthew Passion) in the framework of contemporary culture.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries Bach’s theme appears in different guises in various artworks: film soundtracks, academic musical compositions and “postmodernist” synthetic projects. The emblematic essence of “Erbarme Dich” crystallises in the context of cultural oppositions, such as sacred / profane, high / low, natural / artificial, and so on.

The paper demonstrates an attempt to comprehend on the example of A. Sokurov's cinematic work the relationship between the large-scale screen form (organization of a whole filmography and a separate film) and music as a prototype of the cinematic structure and a component of the audiovisual synthesis. This approach is provoked by the common intonation uniting all director' works and the principle of threading musical themes repeating from film to film, similar to the work of the musical leitmotif system. At the same time in the five-part picture «Spiritual Voices» (1995) a complex combination of a polyphonic temporal structure and archetype of a spiral form (in variants of archaic concentric form and classic sonata) is revealed. Both levels of the large-scale screen form obey in the director's work the universal principle of variations.

The article is devoted to the semantic metamorphoses of «furniture music» («musique d'ameublement») by Eric Sati in the cultural space of the ХХth century. The history of «furniture music» cinematic interpretations demonstrates the evolution from avant-garde language search (R. Clair) to the shaping of a nostalgic retro complex in allegorical figures and visuel realizations of the meditative musical structure within the 'postnarrative' cinema (L. Malle, C. Saura, O. Welles). "Furnishing" function paradoxically revives in the process of simulating the aesthetics of silent – in the films of the 2000’s (M. de Oliveira).

A special feature of mutual penetrability of sound layers in Tarkovsky's films allows us to associate the whole of their sound matter with a becoming system of cultural Сosmos. One of the key ideas is arising of human speech and music from the noise environment. The formation of an acoustic language occurs in Tarkovsky’s films on the basis of the universal sound structure (sound grain). And it is exactly natural acoustic symbol that performs such a function. In the last films (“Nostalgia” and “The Sacrifice”) the role of minimal sound grain plays ringing — phenomenon which pools the regional symbolism of soundscape with the spheres of philosophy and various (both oriental and occidental) types of mystical practices.
Within seven films Tarkovsky gradually brings the idea of acoustic integrity to the level of ethnic generalizations. Through the finding of a universal sound grain it is becoming to be possible to discover the common structural basis of different national and historical forms of musical expression. Musical Cosmos by Tarkovsky includes era of Modern times: Baroque music, Classicism and Romanticism, and also various (Oriental and Occidental) archaic traditions — Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Italian.  /  Книга посвящена разностороннему исследованию музыкального текста в фильмах Андрея Тарковского. Музыка существует в кинокартинах мастера как многослойный развивающийся феномен. Звуковая дорожка запечатлевает эволюцию от дискретности к континуальности, от фабульной обусловленности эвуковой драматургии к ее смысловому отождествлению с универсальными музыкальными концептами различных эпох и культур (от европейского барокко до дзенской медитации). Специфические музыкальные типы временного выстраивания и музыкальная семантика проецируются в визуальный ряд фильмов. В таких условиях изображение оказывается способным создавать новые аспекты музыкальных смыслов, комментировать музыкальную культуру в историческом аспекте, продуцируя индивидуальный режиссерский музыкально-исторический миф.