Scientific prerequisites for studying the rhapsody genre in instrumental music of the 19th-20th centuries

The aim of this research is to study and systematize information in the scientific literature containing the prerequisites for understanding the rhapsody genre, which has previously been unexplored in foreign and domestic musicology. In this regard, information about the origins, etymology, and history of the development of the rhapsody genre in reference and encyclopedic sources and works on the theory of musical genre has been collected, analyzed, and evaluated. The positions of scientists and the main range of problems necessary for identifying the genre invariant of the rhapsody and further investigating its implementation in instrumental music of the 19th and early 20th centuries are also identified. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that previously scattered information about the rhapsody genre in sources of various formats in literary and musicological studies has been identified and generalized for the first time. Foreign works not published in Russian, translated by the author, have been introduced into the scientific discourse of musicology. The rhapsody is a unique musical genre that developed at the intersection of oral and written traditions, and also combined the features of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical types of poetics. Born in ancient Greece and having undergone a significant evolutionary path, possessing undoubted artistic merits as an original genre, it has, unfortunately, not received due research in musicology as a holistic phenomenon of culture and instrumental art. The study of rhapsodies in the music of foreign and Russian composers of the 19th-20th centuries represents a rather complex, relevant, and promising topic for comprehensive research. The methodological foundations and prerequisites for a special scientific understanding of the rhapsody phenomenon, found in the process of analyzing works on art history, have become the main results of the research conducted in the article.