Anton Arensky — educator and master of musical form

Abstract

The article researches the interaction between polyphonic and homophonic and harmonic principles of form in the genre of lyrical miniature. Anton Arensky in his “Manual to Studying Forms of Instrumental and Vocal Music” (the first in Russia, 1893–894), sticks to the common opposition of counterpoint and homophonic building of form. However, in his artistic practice he follows the harmonic interpretation of imitational constructions. Canon as one of symbols of polyphonic reasoning is subject to patterns of homophonic song forms in the age of romanticism. Accepting the alien symmetrical time arrangement (with its dynamic effect of extrapolation) and the directing action of tonal functionality, it becomes not the basic but the additional factor of musical building. The vertical correlation of parts (its essence is in transmission of the same material from one voice into another), which is typical of imitational structure, ceases to be principal for form. Functionally differential, horizontal, juxtaposition when initial exposition is followed by the thematic and harmonic development with subsequent final comes to the fore. Temporal independence of parts, characteristic of a genuinely linear canon, almost vanishes in an integrated temporal stream which is set by the rhythm of harmonic changes. The homophonic (“horizontal”) form becomes leading, while the polyphonic (“vertical”) form moves back to the level of texture. There is a possibility of a different combination of polyphonic and homophonic regularities in composition: adding to the given «cantus» (in the form of basso ostinato in the work by Arensky) not a contrapuntal part, or parts, but the whole homophonic form with its principle of organization; and the resulting emergence of the counterpoint of forms (according to Y. Kholopov), the origin of which has its roots in the Baroque music.