Musical instruments, choirs and chapels in Western Ukrainian early modern iconography

Abstract

The article analyses historical sources and iconographic scenes that significantly expand our understanding of the activities of professional musicians, choirs, and musical chapels within the Orthodox, Uniate, and Catholic liturgical systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores monumental paintings, iconography, and miniatures depicting themes of musical instruments, choirs, and chapels. Additionally, parallels are drawn between the representation of professional musical instruments in the Jewish synagogue pictorial tradition of the same period. Particular attention is paid to clarifying factors such as the clothing of depicted figures, their portrait and age characteristics, social status, the correspondence of musical instruments to their period, as well as documents mentioning specific donors, patrons, and individual performers. A cultural studies approach was applied. To organise the empirical base, analytical, iconographic, and iconological research methods were used. Among other important methods were social media monitoring and content analysis, which made it possible to identify the target audience of the studied issue, key words, emotions within interested groups, and other significant information. The scientific noveltyof the study lies in its interdisciplinary nature. It demonstrates that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Ukrainian iconographic images contain important information about Baroque choirs and performance practices. The number of visual artifacts and their even distribution in the Orthodox, Uniate, Catholic traditions, as well as in Hasidism, gives every reason to believe that musical orchestras, ensembles, and choirs were an important emotional and spectacular part of the cultural life of the community, and the scenes they depict often correspond to reality. Comprehensive studies involving specialists from various fields of applied science, art history, and cultural studies make it possible to examine the issue in its temporal and spatial continuity, thereby gradually restoring the memory of the forgotten musical culture of our ancestors.