String quartets by composers of the Southern Urals in the light of some tendencies of genre development in Russian music of the second half of the XX century

The article for the first time examines the quartet work of composers of the South Urals in the light of the trends characteristic of the development of the bow quartet genre in Russian music of the second half of the XX century. The author studies the features of the implementation of folklore principles in compositions for two violins, viola and cello, the specifics of attracting a verbal compo-nent, and also identifies the leading means of artistic expressiveness that contribute to the embodiment of author’s concepts. Thus, folk song intonations formed the basis of the thematism of quartet cycles by E. G. Gudkov and M. D. Smirnov. The introduction to the instrumental ensemble of the “words of the author” in the form of programmatic titles of works, in general terms revealing their figurative es-sence, as well as detailed explanations of the artistic concept of the opus and methods of its stage imple-mentation, has become a characteristic feature of the quartet works of A. D. Krivoshey and T. Y. Shker-bina. At the same time, each of the quartets of T. Y. Shkerbina is an example of an individual author’s idea and means of its implementation, where the search for a specific quartet phonosphere capable of embodying the composer’s unique plan is carried out. As a result, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that the quartet work of composers of the South Urals is a valuable layer of Russian music with a multifaceted figurative world, in which, despite the originality of ideas, searches and experiments in the field of writing techniques and instrumen-tal means of expression, the traditional aesthetic interpretation of the genre is preserved as a sphere of deeply personal emotions and philosophical reflections of a modern artist expressed “in the first person”.