Eastern Philosophical Paradigms in Contemporary Piano Cycles: Structural-Semantic Dimensions

Resumen

The article examines how Eastern philosophical concepts of time and being inform contemporary compositional thinking beyond stylistic and thematic allusion. The study aims to identify how Eastern categories of time are integrated into the structure of a 21^st century cyclic piano works and how they shape the organization and semantics of musical time. The corpus comprises three cyclic piano works: Bakir Bayakhunov’s Triptych (Esoteric) (2006), Michel Allard’s Yoga Suite (2013) and Chen Yihan’s Spirits (2013). The methodology combines hermeneutic interpretation, a semiotic and philosophical approach to archetypal temporal models, comparative and typological analysis, as well as intonational-semantic analysis of textural and registral processes. The results demonstrate three distinct structural-semantic models of cyclicity: a ritual path in Triptych (Esoteric) (duality – causality – liberation), a spiral model in Yoga Suite (recurrence through transformed returns and accumulated states) and metamorphosis in Spirits (continuous transformation across crystallization and dissolution). On this basis, the article substantiates the genre-form model as an integrative analytical category linking genre premise, temporal organization and philosophical semantics, and argues that contemporary cyclic piano works may be approached as processes of semantic formation rather than as fixed schemes of repetition.