Olexander Kozarenko: spiritual core of the “boundary” composer

The work of the outstanding Ukrainian composer Oleksandr Kozarenko is studied against the background of his active activities as a composer, pianist, teacher and scientist. Based on an understanding of all aspects of the composer’s creativity, the defining goal of his search for the intonation bases of the functioning of Ukrainian music is understood. In this context, the important role of spiritual music is considered, in the field of which the composer saw the basis of the formation of national musical and semiotic processes. For this reason, the composer emphasized the special importance of medieval liturgical music, the repertoire of which is recorded in Ukrainian notoline irmologions of the 16th–18th centuries. Good information O. Kozarenko in the peculiarities of the sacred monody significantly influenced the work of the composer. On this basis, he created many spiritual works, using the intonation fund of sacred monody either in direct citation, or in the formation of personal image-emotional sound reflections on this basis.Selected works of O. Kozarenko are emphasized., testifying to the originality of the composer’s thinking and the ability to improvise using different intonation funds within the same formative framework. Such examples are «Irmologion» and «Microcircuits» for chamber ensemble. A wide palette of genres testifies to the artist’s incredible ability to experience a truly «borderline» emotionality of sensations. The artist’s ability to simultaneously be in a dramatic-expressive or thoughtful-contemplative state of sacred monodic melos is emphasized. The connection between the composer’s work and musicological studies of the artist is also noted, as evidenced by his monograph «The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian National Musical Language». It emphasizes the importance of spiritual music as a basis for enriching all components of the national musical language, as well as an actual way to restore the importance of Ukrainian music in the European context.The main essence of the «limitation» of the composer’s work of the artist, who never forgot his mission and built a special intonation space as a sign of an acute sense of duty to his people, is determined. This space was filled with the horizontality of Western European stylistics and Ukrainian folklore. Instead, the vertical balanced between the grandeur of the existential prayer of spiritual genres and the expressiveness, with an admixture of the grotesque, of theatrical genres.