MUSIC OF WAR: GENRE–STYLISTIC AND ACOUSTIC REFLECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN COMPOSERS

Abstract

The article investigates the ways in which contemporary academic music interprets the experience of war in Ukraine through genre, stylistic, and acoustic parameters of composition. The study approaches wartime music as a form of cultural mediation in which historical trauma is translated into an organized sonic structure that combines ethical reflection with aesthetic form. Within this perspective, musical works become spaces where collective memory, individual emotional experience, and symbolic representation converge. The analysis is based on compositions by contemporary composers, including Sunflower Seeds (2022) by Cesare Chiacchiaretta, the first movement of Symphony No. 5 (2023) by Fazıl Say, Maria’s City (2022) by Zoltan Almashi, and Dedication to the Heroes… (2024) by Valentyna Martyniuk. A methodological combination of structural-intonational, genre-typological, timbral-dramaturgical, semiotic, and contextual-comparative approaches allows the study to reveal the principal artistic strategies through which contemporary composers articulate wartime experience. The results demonstrate that modern compositions addressing war develop specific models of representation. One of them is connected with the activation of historically established memorial genre markers such as requiem or elegiac forms, which preserve the semantic codes of mourning and remembrance. At the same time, it should be stated the transformation of the acoustic environment: clusters, noise textures, extended instrumental techniques, and unstable rhythmic structures construct a sonic field associated with tension, anxiety, and disruption. In this context timbre acquires a structural role, shaping the dramaturgy of the work and functioning as a carrier of symbolic meaning. The study concludes that contemporary music related to war in Ukraine functions simultaneously as an act of cultural memory and as a reflective artistic practice in which genre, style, and programmatic orientation interact to form a new acoustic image of historical experience.