Abstract
The synthesis of music and words generated many diverse results in the European art of the XX century. The ratio of verbal and musical components may differ greatly. The extreme cases are the following: verbal text with minimal addition of music on the one hand and musical composition with separate inclusions of words or word fragments — on the other. There are a lot of intermediate gradations between these two poles including «text-musical forms» where treatment of text is traditional. Some specimens analyzed in this paper (including two compositions in serial technique) occupy different positions of the said scale.