DOUBLE ORIENTATION OF THE ARMENIAN AESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS (ON THE EXAMPLE OF ARMENIAN EARLY MEDIEVAL MUSIC)

Abstract

The article examines the process of formation of the aesthetic consciousness of the Armenian people during the transition from paganism to Christianity. The basis of the concept chosen as the defining one is the proposition that, having gone through a long path of cultural and historical development, the Armenian people, already in the pagan period of their existence, formed a certain “spiritual substrate”, a certain unchangeable “core”, which, having undergone a certain transformation and modification, in its main features retained stability, thereby defining the process of continuity between pagan and Christian cultures. Considering the fact that Christianity is still an absolute guiding factor for Armenian culture today, we can conclude that this unchanging “spiritual substrate” is actively functioning in our time. Having presented the “algorithm” for the formation of this substrate as a result of turning to the cultures of the West (Hellenism) and the East (the culture of Iranian-speaking peoples), it was concluded that there is a dual process that determines the process of formation of national culture. The question is that, having borrowed everything that is most valuable in these cultures, Armenian culture managed to avoid their mechanical copying, their simple imitation. On the contrary, as a result of adequate perception and assimilation of these foreign cultural values, their borrowing, Armenian culture managed not only to preserve, but also to strengthen its roots, and, in essence, to lay claim to universal recognition.

We tried to present the above said using the example of the development of the musical art of the Armenians, taking as a basis folk (peasant), folk-professional (Vipasan, Gusan) and cult (temple, church). The starting point for us was the existing consensus among musicologists that it was monodic (single-voice), even if performed by a choir, that its modes were diatonic, containing semitones, that it contained certain intonationally fixed melodic patterns, representing prototypes of the first voices, and perhaps these voices themselves (typical melodic models).