This film will tell the complex yet compelling story of the “authentic” music movement (a.k.a. the Avtentyka Revival Movement) that has sprung up in Ukraine over the course of the last sixty years. The story locates its starting point on an afternoon way back in 1958, deep within the Cold War depths of the Soviet Era, when an ethnomusicological scholar from Kyiv Conservatory by the name of Volodymyr Matviyenko first visited a tiny village in central Ukraine called Kryachkivka (cryatch-KEEV-ka).

This village happened to be situated in or about that region in Ukraine where traditional music practices had always been strongest—a region in which even after decades of the brutal ravages of Soviet civilization, as well as the somewhat more subtle deteriorations that the general drift of 20th century life carried along with it, such traditional music practices had somehow managed to survive in a state at least approximating full health.

But what Matviyenko discovered in this one particular village was a contingent of rural music makers—a considerable preponderance of them women—who were exceptionally dedicated to preserving the musical traditions that had so long vivified their shared existence.

And it was as a consequence of this, and of the great intrinsic value of their music making, that there developed a sort of collaborative relationship between these music makers of Kryachkivka and a contingent of academic enthusiasts that formed around Matviyenko in Kyiv.

This was a relationship, that is to say, in which one side—the urban-based academics—brought heightened attention and focus to the musical goings-on in the rural village, while at the same time, endeavored to learn from these rustic doyens the proper manner in which to perform this music. And it was thus precisely out of this reciprocal collaborative relationship, then, that an “authentic” music revival movement in Ukraine began to very slowly, very gradually take shape.

Yet what eventually issued out of these “authentic” foundations was not only a “Preservationist”-oriented movement, made up of a plethora of “authentic” music ensembles committed to keeping this music alive—although this stands as a remarkable phenomenon in and of itself—but also a whole larger series of musical developments in which these “authentic” roots have served as the core basis for an extraordinarily wide-ranging array of diverse stylistic modes and approaches: Rock, World Beat and other mainstream popular music; Jazz-inflected and avant-garde experimental musics; Art Theatre-oriented, and even Sacred and Classical music.

And it can truly be said that the best, most aesthetically accomplished of these wide-ranging musical developments did indeed emanate out of, or at least become closely entwined with, this same template of a “collaborative relationship” that was first worked out sixty years ago by Volodymyr Matviyenko and the inhabitants of Kryachkivka.

This can be seen above all in the ongoing practice of “field research”—what essentially amounts to “song collecting” expeditions, undertaken in the multitude of small villages that comprise the Ukrainian countryside —that a great many of Ukraine's most dynamic musical artists have taken part in. This encompasses again, not only those artists belonging to the strictly “Preservationist” side of the “authentic” music movement, but also those who endeavor to expand upon these boundaries, even while keeping “authentic” music roots at the heart of their music making.

Yet as just noted, the “collaborative relationship” template that was forged by Volodymyr Matviyenko is one in which the urban-based, academically trained “researchers” do not merely abstractly analyze the rural music making they find on their expeditions, but instead, interactively engage with the music makers at hand—their presumptive “research subjects”—to the point that they actually join in with, and become an integral part of their music making.

In this way, the music making practices of these rural “research subjects” are established as the authoritative standard to be followed, and as a result, those ostensibly in the position of “academic researchers” become transformed essentially into students, and the “research subjects” themselves into educators, into guides, into gurus. Rather than merely “subjects” of a research project, these living exemplars of an ancient art form are now recognized as the hallowed preceptors of its ways and means—as the rustic Magi of the precious tradition.

The film will depict then how this whole series of developments unfolded by identifying three distinct “sectors” within which this “collaborative relationship” template was adopted: The first two of these “sectors” are grounded in actual academic institutions, both of them located in Kyiv, while the third represents a much looser, yet still coherent entity, centered around the Polish-based, European avant-garde, experimental theatre approaches that were assimilated by a small group of artists originating in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv.

The original, prototype “sector” is of course the one that Volodymyr Matviyenko inaugurated at Kyiv Conservatory. This is where Matviyenko not only kept up his research into Ukrainian traditional music, and continued to further cultivate the “collaborative relationship” with the music makers of Kryachkivka, but in the process, trained a whole younger generation of enthusiasts to do likewise (many of whom went on to employ this same approach in other rural regions of Ukraine).

Out of this broad “sector”, then, would come the first “sprouts” of the “authentic” music revival movement. The first manifestation of this materialized early on, though not at the Conservatory but back in Kryachkivka, when the music makers there were motivated by their collaborative involvement with the Kyivan academics to organize themselves along somewhat more solid lines. They thereby formed a musical ensemble that they decided to call Drevo—meaning “tree” in Ukrainian—which was in fact named after one of the songs that Matviyenko himself came up with, drawing on musical materials he learned in Kryachkivka.

It was only many years later, then—at a moment in which a similar “Preservationist” movement was beginning to crop up in Russia itself—that one of Matviyenko's students, Yevhen Yefremov (soon to become himself a Professor as Kyiv Conservatory), was inspired to finally officially establish a Kyiv-based ensemble, made up of fellow members of Matviyenko's “authentic” music coterie at the Conservatory, which was likewise given the name Drevo (sometimes referred to as “Drevo Kyiv” to distinguish it from the Kryachkivka-based ensemble).

And it was really this Kyiv-based ensemble, as it began to perform more widely, and began to make a name for itself in the public realm—even though in its earliest days only nominally tolerated by the Soviet regime—that then served as the model around which the whole of the “Preservationist”-oriented, Ukrainian “authentic” music revival movement would start to crystallize.

This revival movement began to particularly catch fire in the years following the onset of Ukrainian independence in 1991. And a number of the most consequential figures to take part in this movement were themselves “graduates” of Yefremov's Drevo, and continued to glean from this pioneering ensemble a good deal of their musical foundations.

This was certainly the case with Iryna Klymenko, not only one of the earliest members of “Drevo Kyiv”, but herself a student of Yevhen Yefremov at Kyiv Conservatory. Klymenko would go on to then form under her own leadership the “authentic” music ensembles Volodar and Hurtopravtsi. And it was in conjunction with these two ensembles that Klymenko began to gather around her a coterie of talented young people, and with their assistance, devise a series of projects that made use of “authentic” Ukrainian traditional music in a highly creative fashion.

The collective import of these projects revolved around an attempt to reconstruct, and thus make new again, not merely “authentic” traditional music, but the entire ritualistic context within which this music was originally situated. It might therefore be said that Klymenko, while galvanized by the high aesthetic standards and overall groundbreaking example set by Yefremov's Drevo, actually proceeded in this manner to expand upon its core model.

Moreover, through the collaborative working relationship that Klymenko established with Oleh Skrypka—perhaps the most prominent Ukrainian popular music figure over the course of the whole post-Soviet period—it can be further claimed that the burgeoning “authentic” music revival movement in Ukraine was thereby lifted up to a whole new level, granted now a visibility and stature within the overall environment of Ukrainian national culture that it had not ever possessed before.

And not the least significant upshot of all this was the cluster of musical endeavors that were subsequently hatched by many of younger musicians who participated in Klymenko's projects: Included in this cluster are the important early music ensemble Khoreya Kozatska, the seminal popular music group TaRuta, and two superlative “Preservationist”-oriented “authentic” music ensembles, HulayHorod and Mykhailove Chudo (another unquestionably important “Preservationist”-oriented “authentic” music ensemble, Bozhychi, also had a close association with both Yefremov's Drevo and Klymenko's projects, through the participation in both of Susanna Karpenko, the gifted vocalist/co-founder of Bozhychi).

The second “sector”, then, began itself to take shape very early on in (or even slightly prior to) the Era of Ukrainian Independence over at Kyiv Conservatory's “sister” institution, the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts—KNUCA, for short—under the direction of a professor named Ivan Sinelnikov. It was thus within the framework of KNUCA's Department of Folklore that Sinelnikov launched back in 1991 the student ensemble Kralytsya, purposefully designed as “a training laboratory for future leaders of folk groups”.

Yet, even though it might be said that following along these lines, the Folkloric program at KNUCA was perhaps somewhat more focused on the expressly practical aspects of professional training than was the case at Kyiv Conservatory (where time-honored practices of academic research held sway), the influence of the incipient “authentic” music revival movement that was incubated mainly at the Conservatory, was all the same strongly felt at KNUCA as well.

Hence, what Sinelnikov effectively implemented within the context of the folkloric “training laboratory” at KNUCA was very much the same manner of interactive “collaborative relationship” with rural village music makers that had been set up by Volodymyr Matviyenko and his acolytes at Kyiv Conservatory.

A very important facet of the training that students received in KNUCA's Department of Folklore, then, was the requirement to do “field research”—in other words, to go on “song collecting” expeditions across the Ukrainian countryside, but to do so again, in such a way that the “researchers” do not merely conduct research, but are there to learn first-hand the traditional practice customs of the rural music culture they have ventured out to engage with, and to themselves directly participate in this music culture.

And it was precisely out of this manner of endeavor, and out of the larger educative environment that Sinelnikov oversaw at KNUCA, that much of the musical origins of the now internationally acclaimed experimental “World Beat” group DakhaBrakha can be found. For indeed, all three of the female members of DakhaBrakha—Olena Tsybulska, Iryna Kovalenko and Nina Harenetska—were students at KNUCA, studying under Sinelnikov in the Department of Folklore, and performing together in Kralytsya.

Mulitiple member of two other important Ukrainian groups likewise came out of this same KNUCA environment—Kamo Hrydeshi and the Doox. It is within the domain of mainstream popular music, more specifically Rock, that these two groups have primarily operated, but what really distinguishes the two is the inventive manner in which they have interwoven the Ukrainian traditional music elements their members absorbed as students at KNUCA, into the standard textures of Rock—at times persuasively reworking entire traditional songs as Rock songs (as an interesting sidenote here, Bozychi also had a close relationship with this “KNUCA sector”, as it happens, as multiple members of the ensemble attended this institution as well).

The third “sector”, then, whisks us away from Kyiv to venture to Ukraine's other principal cultural capital, the city of Lviv. It was here that the pioneering artist Maryana Sadovska was born and raised. Sadovska—daughter of the celebrated Ukrainian musician and author Viktor Morozov—also began herself to explore “authentic” traditional music very early on, but came at it, at least at first, from a decidedly very different angle than the Kyivans.

Sadovska, that is to say, got involved at a quite young age in the experimental theatre world—first as a performer for Lviv's Les Kurbas Theatre, and then with the Polish-based Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices, led by the director/theorist Vladimierz Staniewski. It was under the aegis of this latter institution that Sadovska began her own ethnomusicological “field research” expeditions in the early 1990s, adopting an approach toward this endeavor derived from Staniewski, as well as from the pivotal director/theorist Jerzy Grotowski, that was informed by its own version of a “collaborative relationship”.

Thus, much of the work of the Gardzienice Center (which was much influenced by Grotowski) stemmed from an attempt at engaging traditional culture in such a way that entailed close interaction with the living embodiments of this culture. And as this was an approach that dovetailed very readily with the manner of “collaborative relationship” forged by Volodymyr Matviyenko and his acolytes—the approach upon which the Ukrainian “authentic” music revival movement as a whole was founded—it was perhaps nearly inevitable that Sadovska's own activities would soon enough intermingle with this nascent movement.

This was indeed the case, as Sadovska began making her own “pilgrimages” to Kryachkivka, befriending and apprenticing herself to the music makers there, and painstakingly learning from them along the way a whole repertoire of songs, and the proper methodology by which to sing them, which she would make much creative use of in the ensuing years.

Yet in congruence with the avant-garde theatre background from whence she came, Sadovska's own take on this music was by no means strictly “Preservationist”, nor really much in line with standard popular music adaptations of traditional music either, but instead represented an experimentalist enlargement of “authentic” music, one which carried this music into new, hiterto uncharted territories, while at the same time remaining rigorously faithful and true to the music's deep “authentic” character.

And it was this quality—an avant gardist, experimental augmentation of traditional music that manages nonetheless to evince a deep reverential regard for the music itself—that would seem to have served as something of a blueprint for another group of artists in Lviv, a group who would proceed down what amounted in some ways to comparable paths, while in other ways moving things in markedly different directions, too.

This was the innovative ensemble Maisternia Pisni, whose name means “workshop song” in Ukrainian. Formed in the early Aughts, this group likewise arose out of very extensive experimental theatre roots. Indeed, its creative director, Natalia Polovynka—who led the ensemble in conjunction with the Russian-born “methodologist” and dramaturge Sergey Kovalevich —also did a stint at Les Kurbas Theatre, serving as the lead actress there for a number of years.

And both Polovynka and Kovalevich studied and/or worked with the company of Jerzy Grotowksi in Poland, wherein they absorbed much of this same European avant garde theatre take on a “collaborative relationship” with representatives of traditional culture. Moreover, Maisternia Pisni—which in practice really amounted to a world-class all-female vocal trio, comprised of Polovynka, Ulyana Horbachevska and Olena Kostyuk—would go on to make their own “pilgrimage to Kryachkivka”, establishing in the process what would become a very close, long-standing and productive involvement with the music makers there.

In this way, then, it could be said that Maisternia Pisni, just as with Sadovska, effectively amalgamated this avant garde theatre version of a “collaborative relationship”, with the version that undergirded the “authentic” revival movement. And it was from out of this basis that the group endeavored to carve out their own highly distinct approach, in which Ukrainian traditional music served as the foundation for an extensive series of experimental projects.

Yet perhaps their most distinctive innovation involved the group's additional incorporation of elements of age-old religious culture, tapping into what might be called the “deep aesthetics” of Christian religious rites—more specifically, its Eastern Orthodox/Greek Catholic varieties.

This aspect emerged principally out of Polovynka's investigations into an obsolete mode of ancient Ukrainian spiritual chants called irmos. Her stirring and quite profoundly beautiful interpretations of these chants would furnish much of the artistic focus of Polovynka's post-Maisternia Pisni career, in fact, but also bore great influence on the ensemble's sound character while it was still active.

Along with Sadovska, Maisternia Pisni, and Natalia Polovynka's post-Maisternia Pisni's career, then, the other significant contribution made to this Lviv-based “sector” was put forward by Ulyana Horbachevska in her post-Maisternia Pisni career. What Horbachevska has undertaken here is clearly built off of the innovations that Maisternia Pisni attained to, yet she has also expanded upon this basis, in some respects taking things a great deal further in fact, advancing intrepidly and very cogently into spheres that hardly no-one else has—or at least not in the same persuasive manner.

This can be seen especially in regards to her years-long association with a circle of some of Europe's most accomplished and exploratory Jazz musicians, including Lithuania's Petras Vyšniauskas and Germany's Klaus Kugel. With this cadre, Horbachevska has engaged in a series of unique musical experiments that commingle the “authentic” traditional music that she learnt first-hand in Kryachkivka, along with the sacred music she partook of as a member of Maisternia Pisni, with some of the finest and most adventurous expositions of open-ended Free Jazz that have yet transpired on the European continent.

It will be an unfolding depiction of these three “sectors”, then, that will comprise the central trunk of this film's narrative. This depiction will be presented, however, for the most part in a chronological fashion, thereby mixing together facets of all three “sectors” as it proceeds, rather than by moving consecutively from one to the other, as it was just now rendered in this Outline.

The film will then conclude with what will amount to a pair of meditations on the fate of Ukrainian “authentic” music moving forward—what the future prospects of this music might turn out to be, particularly as it is faced now with the “subtle deteriorations” of 21st century life: all of those mass media mechanisms—exploding in recent years into a state of near-overwhelming hyperdrive—which in truth, bear both the capacity to help preserve this music, to assist in perpetuating its existence into the future, but that at the same time present substantial challenges to its capacity to maintain itself in what might be called a well-functioning condition of vital coherence.

The first of these “meditations” will involve an account of the “Celebration of Spring” or Vesna Event held at the “Art Arsenal” in Kyiv on March 1, 2015. Although not necessarily an affair of enormous magnitude, in terms of either its size or essential character, this was all the same an event of not inconsiderable import, in so far as it represented what might be now be perceived as the moment in which the Ukrainian “authentic” music movement attempted to assert itself, in a form even more expansive than previously, as a true overarching creative force in Ukrainian society in the post-Maidan era.

Indeed, this Vesna Event of 2015—organized by a group of leading “authentic” music artists such as Susanna Karpenko, Maksym Berezhniuk (of the Doox) and Serhiy Okhrimchuk (of “Drevo Kyiv” and well-nigh uncountable other endeavors)—stood in many ways as the heir of the numerous projects that Iryna Klymenko put together in conjunction with Oleh Skrypka some years before.

And although by no means a failure or disappointment—it in fact constituted a definite aesthetic success, as the musical examples taken from the event will attest to—this Vesna Event of 2015 all the same did not seem to engender or lead the way towards any further events of a similar ilk in the post-Maidan sociocultural landscape, as one might have expected, but rather seem now to almost have been a sort of “Last Hurrah”, the swan song of a veritable Golden Era of the Ukrainian Avtentyka Revival Movement, that lasted from roughly 2010 to roughly 2015.

And what has chiefly taken the place of any further development of the type of musical happening that this Vesna Event of 2015 represented—a happening in which “authentic” traditional music serves as the vital center of a larger array of musical expression which its influence advantageously permeates, an influence that is then in turn advantageously reciprocated (which is in fact an exemplar in fine of much of the music that this film has spotlighted)—is an icy, mass media-imbued Techno mode, which although it at times appropriates aspects of “authentic” traditional music, does so in such a way that leaves this “authentic” music behind in a diminished and bereft state.

It should be stipulated here, though, that the film will deliberately leave this whole interpretation just proferred as a provocative open question, rather than a conclusive statement handed down in an imperious manner. It will be an open question, moreover, that will be taken up in a Grand Symposium, convened precisely so as to address such matters—and which will thereby allow opposing viewpoints to state their case as well—excerpts of which will be shown at the end of the film. This will immediately follow excerpts of a Grand Concert—a performance which will bring together in one place and time all the musical figures that the film has included—both of which get-togethers will (hopefully) take place on two consecutive days in Kryackivka itself.

Before the film reaches this culmination point, however, there will be a second “meditation”. This will take the form of a consideration of Danylo Pertsov's symphonic work Bitter Star, which has received thus far a single performance only, again at the “Art Arsenal” in Kyiv, on April 26, 2016.

Bitter Star is a work concerned with the Chornobyl Nuclear Disaster of Spring 1986, and in many respects, can itself be considered a sort of meditation: a meditation above all on modernity and tradition, and on the interrelation between the two. This is so particularly in so far as this interrelation touches upon the fate of Ukrainian society overall, and in so far as Ukrainian society can be posited as an entity capable of maintaining some genuine connection with the latter, within the confines of the former.

“Tradition” within the context of the work is in fact embodied by Ukrainian “authentic” music culture—and indeed, a significant number of the artists featured elsewhere in this film play a central role in the performance of Bitter Star that was given at the “Art Arsenal” in 2016. “Modernity”, on the other hand, is represented by the advent of the Chornobyl Disaster, which actually occurred precisely in that region which, as mentioned at the start of this Outline, had long stood as that place in which Ukrainian traditional music practices had always been strongest and best preserved—a location not so far in fact from Kryachkivka itself.

All of this will be presented in the film—and will be done so in a manner that can be characterized as nuanced and subtle, rather than as blunt and overbearing—not as any sort of ill-considered, blanket condemnation of modernity, but rather with the underlying comprehension that the momentous technological advances that suffuse, and really define much of the character of modernity, while without question often enough conferring a great beneficence, can if handled in a thoughtless and negligent manner (which the Chornobyl Disaster certainly stands as the quintessential dark epitome thereof), result only in catastrophic rampant degradation and ruin.



Pavlo Senchyna