The First Ethnomusical Publications by Volodymyr Hoshovskyi

Relevance of the study. In 2022, the world community will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the outstanding Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Volodymyr Hoshovskyi. This date inspires a research of Hoshovskyi’s scientific career and his achievements. The main purpose of the study is to focus on less known period of scientific biography of V. Hoshovskyi and discuss his first ethnomusicological publications in 1958–1961, written in Transcarpathia in the early period of his scientific career. Scientific novelty of the research. V. Hoshovskyi’s early publications are considered in a new perspective. For the first time, the links between his four first published works have been revealed. Some of the publications have not yet been deeply analyzed in Ukrainian ethnomusicology. The main results and conclusions of the study. The study proved that not only a few, as was thought previously, but all early publications of V. Hoshovskyi discuss the issues of musical dialectology. The study «On the issue of musical dialects of Transcarpathia» (1958) became the first study on this problem. Taking into account the geographical landscape and stylistic heterogeneity of the folk music of the region, the scientist sketched out the main groups of musical dialects. The article «Some peculiarities of the historical development of Ukrainian folk song in Transcarpathia» (1959) touched upon the aspects of history influencing the formation of musical dialects and revealed such aspects as 1) the East Slavic origin of Transcarpathian music; 2) the processes of assimilation during the thousand years of Hungarian expansion, 3) contacts between inhabitants of the multinational Austria and Hungary. The issue of the influence of Czech and Slovak folklore on folk songs of Transcarpathia V. Hoshovskyi considered separately in the publication «Czech and Slovak songs in Ukrainian folklore of the Transcarpathian region of the Ukrainian SSR» (Prague, 1961; 1962, in Czech), thereby completing a historical review of multinational influences on folk music of Transcarpathia. The key role for the further Hoshovskyi scientific work had the article «Musical archaisms and their dialectal features in Transcarpathia» (1960), dedicated to the development of the methodology of musical and dialectical research. The innovative approach of V. Hoshovskyi consisted in a combination of achievements in related sciences: linguo-geography and ethnomusicology and was associated with a great rise in linguodialectic research in Transcarpathia. Thus, the early publications of V. Hoshovskyi identified the object of research, the reasons for the formation of musical dialects and outlined the methodology for their study. These studies reflected the stage of the formation of V. Hoshovskyi as a scientist, and in a broader sense – the first steps of Ukrainian ethnomusicology towards the development of musical dialectology.