Approaches to methodological perspectives of applying the conceptual concept of “church music” in the contextual section of encyclopedic publications

The accurate application of similar or close concepts at the intersection of the content planes of academic, postacademic, and liturgical musicology is an important problem for the development of the modern methodological apparatus, as well as for the improvement of the level of scientific works. First of all, it concerns such fundamental concepts as “church music” and “church singing”. As the analysis of the selected material has shown, the definitions of their content to date cover a variety of historical-cultural, cognitive, aesthetic, artistic and socio-cultural and other aspects. To a large extent, such definitions rely on the liturgical traditions of a particular nation.At the same time, given the differences in such traditions, the meaning of these concepts has not yet been established; they are applied as “accepted” terms to completely different phenomena of church-singing tradition, composer or amateur creativity of different historical eras and styles.In particular, despite the dominance of the system of canonical genres (first of all – in ancient formations with a completely “vertical” meditativity or extreme concentration of attention as a sacred way to achieve objectives), the terms “church music” and “church singing” apply unconditionally to some genres of paraliturgical music, first of all – the choral concerts, as well as samples of compositional creativity of the last third of the 20th century – the first decades of the 21st century. However, this approach encourages numerous reservations both in view of the scientific value of such works and the development of the methodological potential of musicology.The need for differentiation of these concepts, their correct application in scientific practice (at least in relation to different historical periods) is becoming increasingly evident. Therefore, the proposed article is a contribution to the elaboration of this problem already started in national musicology, as well as an attempt to attract the attention of a wide range of researchers for further correlation of methodological approaches of Ukrainian scientific works with world experience in this important scientific field.