{"id":19587,"date":"2022-10-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=19587"},"modified":"2022-10-06T11:42:20","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T09:42:20","slug":"the-music-of-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/2022\/10\/04\/the-music-of-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Music of Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Music of Ukraine<\/h4>\n\n

Protect and survive<\/h2>\n\n

Even before the current Russian invasion, Ukraine has had to battle hard to secure its own culture and musical identity, as Daniel Jaff\u00e9<\/span><\/strong> <\/span>discovers <\/p>\n\n

\"\"
Cultural ambassadors:<\/strong> Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra conducted by its founder Keri-Lynn Wilson in July 2022 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

\u2018Riding under fire and rockets is a very interesting experience, but I do not wish it on anyone.\u2019 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: \u2018It 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n

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, \u2018cutting 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.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n

The war, of course, has profoundly changed Baryshevskyi\u2019s experience of performing: \u2018It\u2019s impossible to play in the same way \u2013 the war is always on your mind.\u2019 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 <\/span>Greenland, <\/em>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: \u2018I expressed from pain and anger to tears, to some kind of tenderness, and hope, and belief \u2013 so a lot of different things that were in my mind and heart.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

As Baryshevskyi realised, music\u2019s 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 \u2018front line\u2019 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 \u2013 particularly given Vladimir Putin\u2019s repeated claim that Ukraine is a \u2018fake country\u2019 with no true identity or culture of its own. <\/p>\n\n

‘With the war, it\u2019s impossible to play in the same way. I express a lot of things that are in my mind and heart’<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

\"\"
At the front line:<\/strong> Antonii Baryshevskyi and violinist Aleksey Semenenko livestream \u2018Unplayed Concert\u2019 at the Lviv National Philharmonic Hall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
\"\"
Leading composers of our time:<\/strong> Alla Zagaykevych, a pioneer in electronic music<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Sadly, Putin\u2019s 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\u2019s first Electronic Music Studio at the Kyiv Conservatory, surely speaks for many in her reaction to the invasion: \u2018We all knew about the genocide of the Ukrainian people by Stalin \u2013 the Holodomor. Now it\u2019s all happening again.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

She is referring to the man-made famine \u2013 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\u2019s 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, \u2018In 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.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Many of the Ukrainian musicians and composers caught up in Stalin\u2019s cultural purge were close associates of the legendary nationalist composer Mykola Lysenko (1842- 1912). To understand Lysenko\u2019s significance to Ukraine\u2019s 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\u2019s music) acquainted with the history of Finland\u2019s struggle for independence from Russia. <\/p>\n\n

\u2018The Russian attack just confirms its past colonial policy towards Ukraine and its music\u2019 <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

\"\"
The composer Mykola Lysenko (below), whose monument (above) outside the Kyiv Opera House is now boarded up and sandbagged<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n

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 \u2013 the \u2018Tsar liberator\u2019 (so-called for granting emancipation to Russia\u2019s serfs) \u2013 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 \u2018protector\u2019 of a family of Slavic peoples that it claimed to be essentially all \u2018Russian\u2019 \u2013 most especially the Ukrainians (who happened to occupy a land rich in resources), conveniently identified as \u2018little Russians\u2019 \u2013 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\u2019s division between Russia and Poland, were depicted by 19th-century nationalists as anti-authoritarian and democratically spirited \u2013 qualities which were, of course, anathema to Imperial Russia\u2019s authoritarian character.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

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 \u2013 where his overt Ukrainian identification would have been, to say the least, problematic \u2013 but the Leipzig Conservatory. As Chekan says, \u2018We need to understand Ukrainian music as part of European music \u2013 they have deep relationships and connections.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n

It should also be remembered that much of what is now western Ukraine, including such cities as Lviv, was not under Russia\u2019s rule during Lysenko\u2019s life, but enjoyed the relatively lenient and orderly rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even through the Soviet years, when Ukraine \u2013 having been united during its short period of independence \u2013 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\u2019s collective tendency to look longingly towards Europe. Hence the case of Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963), who studied in Prague under Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s pupil V\u00edt\u011bzslav Nov\u00e1k (who encouraged his interest in Ukrainian folk music), then devoted his career to the Lviv Conservatory until denounced under Stalin\u2019s Soviet regime in 1948 and sent to a gulag in his sixties. <\/p>\n\n

\"\"
A tradition under threat:<\/strong> Oleksandr Koshyts on tour in the 1920s with his Ukrainian chorus<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

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\u2019s Prayer <\/em>for <\/em>Ukraine <\/em>as their nation\u2019s second anthem during its brief pre-Soviet period of independence (following Russia\u2019s February Revolution in 1917). He also \u2013 while touring around the world with his choir from 1919 as cultural ambassadors of the newly established Ukrainian People\u2019s Republic \u2013 effectively promoted what is perhaps Ukraine\u2019s single most well-known work, \u2018Carol of the Bells\u2019, originally an arrangement of the Ukrainian song \u2018Shchedryk\u2019 by Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921). <\/p>\n\n

Koshyts\u2019s mission to promote his nation\u2019s 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 \u00e9migr\u00e9s \u2013 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 \u2018early music\u2019 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\u2019s <\/span>Dido <\/em>and <\/em>Aeneas.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

\"\"
Yuri Shevchenko, composer of We Are,<\/em> who died in Kyiv soon after the invasion began<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

But what of Ukraine\u2019s own recent music? As Chekan tells me, \u2018Ukrainian classical music today is very diverse: avant-garde and traditional, modernist and postmodern \u2013 you name it. Our musical heritage is very rich, so everyone can find in it what they want.\u2019 He mentions several composers, though sadly, as I discover working through Chekan\u2019s list afterwards, a number have died during the present conf lict. One is Yuri Shevchenko, who lost his life in Kyiv on 23 March \u2013 his touching \u2018paraphrase\u2019 of the Ukrainian Anthem, We <\/em>Are, <\/em>composed during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity (which overthrew Ukraine\u2019s pro-Russian President Yanukovych), was memorably performed as the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra\u2019s encore at the BBC Proms in July. Shevchenko\u2019s album <\/span>Crossed <\/em>Paths, <\/em>available to stream, provides further attractive examples of his work which, as Chekan says, \u2018mixes folk and Romantic music\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\"\"
Cellist-composer Zoltan Almashi<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Among the still-living composers, there\u2019s Lyubava Sidorenko (b1979), whose eerily atmospheric White <\/em>Angel <\/em>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\u2019s hard to find new Ukrainian music either on disc or as downloads \u2013 hopefully this will change when the war is over.) <\/p>\n\n

But what of the future of Ukraine\u2019s music, assuming the nation survives this terrible conf lict? Zagaykevych has her own views: \u2018I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been thinking about the experience of the European avant-garde 1950-60 \u2013 its attempt to reset European music. Something similar is waiting for us.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n

\"\"
Baryshevskyi in the Lviv Library, while volunteers assemble camouflage<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Yet Zagaykevych thinks it\u2019s important that Ukraine maintains its historic continuity, and so essentially agrees with Baryshevskyi, who tells me: \u2018I would like Ukrainian music to be heard more often on the world stage \u2013 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.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n

To discover more about Ukrainian music, visit: <\/h5>\n\n

Ukrainian Art Song Project<\/span><\/strong> (ukrainianartsong. ca) <\/em>\u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n

Ukrainian Live Classic <\/span><\/strong>(ukrainianlive.org<\/a>) <\/em>\u2013 a Ukraine-based resource for scores by 20th-century and contemporary composers including Valentin Silvestrov. <\/p>\n\n

The Claquers<\/span><\/strong> (theclaquers.com<\/a>) <\/em>\u2013 news and information about Ukrainian music today, managed by a team of young Ukrainian music critics. <\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
\n

A lost Ukrainian? <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The <\/em>case <\/em>for <\/em>Prokofiev <\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As Ukraine reclaims its heritage, there\u2019s 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 \u2013 where his parents had moved for the sake of his Russian agronomist father\u2019s career \u2013 until, aged 13, he was admitted to the St Petersburg Conservatory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>Kotko <\/em>(1939). Set during the Civil War (and, implicitly, Ukraine\u2019s war of independence), Act III presents an idyllic summer\u2019s evening then destroyed by invaders portrayed with brutal, relentlessly advancing ostinatos (surely resonant after the Holodomor). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most remarkably, and contrary to Stalinist doctrine proscribing \u2018bourgeois nationalist art\u2019, Prokofiev followed this with a choral setting of a poem by the celebrated Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), Zapovit <\/em>(\u2018My Testimony\u2019), a prayer that Ukrainians may \u2018break your heavy chains, and water your freedom with the blood of our enemies\u2019. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n

GETTY, ALAMY, GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION\/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BRIDGEMAN, ANTON KRUSHKOV, FACEBOOK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Jaff\u00e9 discovers \u2018Riding under fire and rockets is a very interesting experience, but I do not wish it on anyone.\u2019 So Yurii Cheka nof the Kyiv 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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 Jaff\u00e9 discovers \u2018Riding under fire and rockets is a very interesting experience, but I do not wish it on anyone.\u2019 So Yurii Cheka nof the Kyiv…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19587"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20339,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587\/revisions\/20339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}