The Music of Ukraine
Protect and survive
Even before the current Russian invasion, Ukraine has had to battle hard to secure its own culture and musical identity, as Daniel Jaffé discovers
‘Riding under fire and rockets is a very interesting experience, but I do not wish it on anyone.’ So Yurii Cheka nof the Kyiv Conservatory wrote to me earlier this year, recalling his fraught experience of escaping under Russian fire from his home in Vorzel, a small village outside Bucha. Having been trapped in their basement for a week, he and his family had made several attempts to escape: ‘It was very dangerous. We drove about 5km from home three times and came back three times. Fortunately, my son-in-law, who works in the Ukrainian army, told me about a safe path, and we finally came out of this hell. We are all alive, and this is the most important thing. I lost my library, all my notes, my sketches, but now my family and I are safe.’
The pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi also had to flee his Kyiv home as Russian shelling started. Once in Lviv, he was at first occupied with doing voluntary work, ‘cutting ribbons for camouf lage nets, packing humanitarian aid packages of medication and clothes for both refugees and for the army. It took some time to understand whether music was needed at all now.’
The war, of course, has profoundly changed Baryshevskyi’s experience of performing: ‘It’s impossible to play in the same way – the war is always on your mind.’ Yet the result for him has been a re-engagement with what music can mean, as he discovered while giving a series of fundraising concerts in Lviv. One piece he played was Greenland, a 50-minute piano suite by the Ukrainian composer Alexey Shmurak (b1986). Premiered in Kyiv on 21 February, just two days before the invasion, the music now became an emotional conduit for Baryshevskyi: ‘I expressed from pain and anger to tears, to some kind of tenderness, and hope, and belief – so a lot of different things that were in my mind and heart.’
As Baryshevskyi realised, music’s ability to give expression to the innermost pain and desires of the heart, and the precious communion it creates between performer and listener, places it in the ‘front line’ as much as the soldiers defending his country. Hearing such performances is presumably the more poignant for Ukrainians when it involves music by their compatriots and forebears – particularly given Vladimir Putin’s repeated claim that Ukraine is a ‘fake country’ with no true identity or culture of its own.
‘With the war, it’s impossible to play in the same way. I express a lot of things that are in my mind and heart’
Sadly, Putin’s claim, bluntly stated as it is, is not news to any Ukrainian who knows their history. Alla Zagaykevych (b1966), an award-winning film composer and founder of Ukraine’s first Electronic Music Studio at the Kyiv Conservatory, surely speaks for many in her reaction to the invasion: ‘We all knew about the genocide of the Ukrainian people by Stalin – the Holodomor. Now it’s all happening again.’
She is referring to the man-made famine – thought to have been deliberately targeted by Stalin at Ukraine. She also refers to the fate of a generation of Ukrainian artists and writers who had f lourished in the brief period in the 1920s when the various ethnicities within the Soviet Union were encouraged to cultivate their own languages and cultures (hence the famous example of the Armenian Khachaturian being encouraged as a student in the 1920s to cultivate his Caucasian heritage). In 1929, Stalin drastically reversed this policy, effectively reverting to a more extreme version of the Russification that had been Russia’s policy through the 19th century. In the 1930s, hundreds of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals, most particularly those who wrote in the Ukrainian language, were arrested and deported, imprisoned or executed. As Zagaykevych summarises it, ‘In the 1930s the Soviet system really destroyed all living and progressive areas of Ukrainian culture and music. The attack by the Russian military only confirms the colonial policy of the USSR towards Ukraine and its music. Once again, Russia wishes to wash it all away forever.’
Many of the Ukrainian musicians and composers caught up in Stalin’s cultural purge were close associates of the legendary nationalist composer Mykola Lysenko (1842- 1912). To understand Lysenko’s significance to Ukraine’s musical history, we need to take a brief detour and see how Russia and Ukraine have respectively viewed their own destinies since at least the early 19th century. It is a tale of two irreconcilable mythologies, with some of the issues familiar to anyone (particularly fans of Sibelius’s music) acquainted with the history of Finland’s struggle for independence from Russia.
‘The Russian attack just confirms its past colonial policy towards Ukraine and its music’
While for Finland it all began when Tsar Nicholas II started a process of Russification in 1899, for Ukraine that process began much earlier. In 1876, Alexander II – the ‘Tsar liberator’ (so-called for granting emancipation to Russia’s serfs) – issued an edict that banned the Ukrainian language being used either in public spaces or in print. The edict brought to the surface an irreconcilable difference: while Imperial Russia saw, or at least presented itself, as ‘protector’ of a family of Slavic peoples that it claimed to be essentially all ‘Russian’ – most especially the Ukrainians (who happened to occupy a land rich in resources), conveniently identified as ‘little Russians’ – Ukrainian nationalists were glorifying their supposed ancestors, the Zaporozhian Cossacks of the 16th and 17th centuries. Those wild frontier warriors, who had held sway in the region until Ukraine’s division between Russia and Poland, were depicted by 19th-century nationalists as anti-authoritarian and democratically spirited – qualities which were, of course, anathema to Imperial Russia’s authoritarian character.
Lysenko, himself descended from highranking Cossack officers of the 17th century, was brought up on the lore of that heritage, pride in his Ukrainian ancestors being instilled from an early age. He also, crucially, gained his musical education not from Russia – where his overt Ukrainian identification would have been, to say the least, problematic – but the Leipzig Conservatory. As Chekan says, ‘We need to understand Ukrainian music as part of European music – they have deep relationships and connections.’
It should also be remembered that much of what is now western Ukraine, including such cities as Lviv, was not under Russia’s rule during Lysenko’s life, but enjoyed the relatively lenient and orderly rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even through the Soviet years, when Ukraine – having been united during its short period of independence – came entirely under Russian hegemony (no matter the original intention of the Soviet experiment), many western Ukrainians fondly remembered Austrian rule, so adding to Ukraine’s collective tendency to look longingly towards Europe. Hence the case of Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963), who studied in Prague under Dvořák’s pupil Vítězslav Novák (who encouraged his interest in Ukrainian folk music), then devoted his career to the Lviv Conservatory until denounced under Stalin’s Soviet regime in 1948 and sent to a gulag in his sixties.
Although Lysenko later chose to study orchestration under Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, he refused to collaborate with the Imperial Russian Music Society, since it would not countenance the study and promotion of indigenous Ukrainian culture. Instead, Lysenko founded his own Music and Drama School in 1904, the first institution of higher music education where classes were taught in Ukrainian, with Ukrainian folk traditions given a place on the curriculum. Among its graduates was the choirmaster and composer Oleksandr Koshyts, who through his choir effectively established his former teacher’s Prayer for Ukraine as their nation’s second anthem during its brief pre-Soviet period of independence (following Russia’s February Revolution in 1917). He also – while touring around the world with his choir from 1919 as cultural ambassadors of the newly established Ukrainian People’s Republic – effectively promoted what is perhaps Ukraine’s single most well-known work, ‘Carol of the Bells’, originally an arrangement of the Ukrainian song ‘Shchedryk’ by Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921).
Koshyts’s mission to promote his nation’s music outside Ukraine has been resumed since the country regained its independence in 1991. With the ongoing war, most of the work is necessarily done online (see websites at the end of this article), whether by young Ukrainian musicians and musicologists, or by intrepid émigrés – many of them, such as the bass singer Pavlo Hunka, based in Canada. Before the war, though, there were new performing initiatives such as the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, organised by the dynamic young composer Albert Saprykin, who set out to build bridges with western European contemporary composers and ensembles. And an ‘early music’ project, Open Opera, not only organised concerts of works by the great Renaissance Ukrainian Mikola Diletsky (c1630-80) but has also involved such celebrity performers as Emma Kirkby, and staged foreign operas such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
But what of Ukraine’s own recent music? As Chekan tells me, ‘Ukrainian classical music today is very diverse: avant-garde and traditional, modernist and postmodern – you name it. Our musical heritage is very rich, so everyone can find in it what they want.’ He mentions several composers, though sadly, as I discover working through Chekan’s list afterwards, a number have died during the present conf lict. One is Yuri Shevchenko, who lost his life in Kyiv on 23 March – his touching ‘paraphrase’ of the Ukrainian Anthem, We Are, composed during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity (which overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovych), was memorably performed as the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra’s encore at the BBC Proms in July. Shevchenko’s album Crossed Paths, available to stream, provides further attractive examples of his work which, as Chekan says, ‘mixes folk and Romantic music’.
Among the still-living composers, there’s Lyubava Sidorenko (b1979), whose eerily atmospheric White Angel for soprano and electronics may be found on YouTube; and the cellist-composer Zoltan Almashi (b1975), whose attractive works (try his Chamber Cantata of 2015 for violin and string orchestra) may also be heard on YouTube. (Sadly, it’s hard to find new Ukrainian music either on disc or as downloads – hopefully this will change when the war is over.)
But what of the future of Ukraine’s music, assuming the nation survives this terrible conf lict? Zagaykevych has her own views: ‘I’ve been thinking about composers who wrote during and after World War II. Too scary. Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Schoenberg. Nono, Boulez. Stockhausen. How did they survive? How did you write music? I’ve been thinking about the experience of the European avant-garde 1950-60 – its attempt to reset European music. Something similar is waiting for us.’
Yet Zagaykevych thinks it’s important that Ukraine maintains its historic continuity, and so essentially agrees with Baryshevskyi, who tells me: ‘I would like Ukrainian music to be heard more often on the world stage – in principle, this is what is happening now, but thanks, unfortunately, to the horrible, tragic circumstances. Composers such as Valentin Silvestrov, Vladimir Zagortsev, Svyatoslav Lunyov, Boris Lyatoshynsky and Maxim Shalygin deserve to be heard and appreciated in the context of global music culture.’
To discover more about Ukrainian music, visit:
Ukrainian Art Song Project (ukrainianartsong. ca) – created by the Toronto-based singer Pavlo Hunka, this offers free PDFs by significant composers such as Mykola Lysenko, and the late Romantics Kyrylo Stetsenko and Vasyl Barvinsky.
Ukrainian Live Classic (ukrainianlive.org) – a Ukraine-based resource for scores by 20th-century and contemporary composers including Valentin Silvestrov.
The Claquers (theclaquers.com) – news and information about Ukrainian music today, managed by a team of young Ukrainian music critics.
A lost Ukrainian?
The case for Prokofiev
As Ukraine reclaims its heritage, there’s been debate over whether certain composers should now be considered Ukrainian rather than Russian. One case is Prokofiev (above, aged 7), born and raised in a rural estate in Ukraine – where his parents had moved for the sake of his Russian agronomist father’s career – until, aged 13, he was admitted to the St Petersburg Conservatory.
Prokofiev used elements of the Ukrainian alphabet when writing to his mother, and his love of Ukraine is evident in several of his works, most particularly his first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko (1939). Set during the Civil War (and, implicitly, Ukraine’s war of independence), Act III presents an idyllic summer’s evening then destroyed by invaders portrayed with brutal, relentlessly advancing ostinatos (surely resonant after the Holodomor).
Most remarkably, and contrary to Stalinist doctrine proscribing ‘bourgeois nationalist art’, Prokofiev followed this with a choral setting of a poem by the celebrated Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), Zapovit (‘My Testimony’), a prayer that Ukrainians may ‘break your heavy chains, and water your freedom with the blood of our enemies’.