Musicology Annotation << Back About Successive Process of Forming Interpretation Stachinskiy Vladimir I. This article describes the process of discrete thinking of a musician in the search for an artistic image of a musical work performed by him. As his adept guide, he is obliged to ensure the embodiment of his creative plan, using the entire arsenal of performing tools. The creation of an interpretation is the transition of a large amount of accumulated information to a new quality, the actualization of knowledge, ideas, archetypes stored in musical memory, in comparison with the text of a particular work. The figurative and emotional sphere in the interpretation depends on the degree of expression of sound expression, justified both by the musical text and found by the performer in the context of associative comparison and figurative refinement. Creative imagination forces the performer to model and improve the image-phantom in his ideal hearing-representation. At the same time, in order to build a figurative model of a work, a musician-performer, in addition to the instructions of the author, resorts to an associative method in constructing a musical image using verbal or pictorial (visual) comparisons. Thus, the basis of the performing interpretation is a successive process, which is expressed in a discrete search for archetypal features present in the text and context of a musical work. On the examples of the Concert for E. Elgar's Cello, Fantasy Overture “Hamlet” and the opera “Queen of Spades” P.I. Tchaikovsky reveals the role of genre and program as factors in revealing the artistic image of the conductor-performer. Keywords: artistic image in interpretation, simultaneity, successive process, archetypal meanings in music, genre, program, performing interpretation, discrete thinking, E. Elgar Concert for cello e-moll, P.I. Tchaikovsky Overture-Fantasy “Hamlet” f-moll, opus 67a, P.I. Tchaikovsky opera The Queen of Spades. DOI: 10.25791/musicology.07.2020.1138 Pp. 27-34.