Category Archives: Ukraine

Ukraine: first days

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Achievements to date: learning how to use a cell phone with Russian menus and making a whole THREE phone calls to strangers (1 in Russian, 2 in Ukrainian).

My sister and I left Canada last Friday. Two days and several long layovers later, we have finally arrived in Kiev. I was disappointed to discover that the Chopin Airport in Warsaw did NOT have pianos OR Chopin impersonators playing mazurkas at every gate, as I hoped, but there was quite a bit of Chopin-related merchandize in the duty-free shops.

I was born in Ukraine, but I’ve been living in Canada long enough that my visits to the Motherland are always a bit of a culture shock. There is an insane contrast between the restored, shiny and super expensive centre with its luxury cars and fashionable, stilettoed women, and the slummy suburbs made up of endless blocks of Soviet-era concrete apartments*. The transit system also gets increasingly questionable the further you travel from the central areas. The neighbourhood I’m saying in boasts rickety 50-year-old trams featuring razor-sharp ticket validators (two of my fingers were bloody before I felt any pain) and old ladies in babushkas squeezing themselves through the dense crowd to collect transit payment.

To my great joy, I’ve discovered that one can see an opera for $1.20 at the National Opera House. That’s cheaper than a bag of chips in Canada. The most expensive ticket is about $25. The season also features several works by Ukrainian composers, which I read about but could not find back in Canada. I’m pretty thrilled. Next weekend should be a triple hit consisting of one ballet and two operas.

While searching for the opera house, we stumbled upon two street performers who could have made a perfect postcard of Ukrainian stereotypes. They were twin sisters – blonde, modelesque and dressed to the nines – playing banduras and singing Ukrainian folksongs in harmony. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but there was a creepy older man filming them quite closely on his iPhone so maybe you can find that video on the internet (here’s one with no sound, who needs sound with women like that?).

See my sister’s take on the situation here.

* Granted, there are lots of stilettoed women in the slummy suburbs too, hopping over puddles and weaving stealthy through streets dug up for plumbing repairs some years ago.

Bundle Update

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I’ve been lost in opera/thesis land for a while, hiding out in my parents’ jungle-like garden home. I haven’t been keeping up with the outside world all that well (the vegetation is thick!), but I bring you a few updates on older stuff and a peek at a new initiative to promote experimental music.

A couple of weeks ago, in The Power of Bundles, I talked about a nifty site selling indie music as a pay-what-you-want bundle. With only 10 hours left to go, I went to check out its progress. It seems the sales slowed down a little after the initial spurt and the total now sits around $400,000. It’s a healthy $66,000 per album minus charity and the website’s share. More importantly, this music reached an audience of almost 50,000 people. Definitely an idea worth exploring for contemporary art music.

I’d like to point out a new experimental music company braving the web frontier. Soundcarrier Music Network* is a new site founded by Halifax musicians Norman Adams and Alex Kall active in the Atlantic improv scene. The site distributes “improvised, experimental, new and free music” selling both studio albums and high quality live recordings. The approach recognizes the value of distributing rougher concert recordings, which is especially appropriate for the more improv-based scene they cater to. The site also charges more for individual tracks longer than 10 minutes. Soundcarrier’s catalogue is still quite small and I’m not sure how they are promoting themselves, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them if you are into that sort of thing.

In Explores of New Frontiers I talked about a somewhat misguided use of crowdfunding platforms. I hoped to be wrong because they seem like a lovely organization, but a month in, that particular campaign is sitting at only $380. But they still have 27 days to go. Maybe their fans will come through in the end.

In other news, I finally bought my plane tickets to Kyiv (Kiev) and will have the pleasure of spending the night on a bench at the Frederic Chopin airport in Warsaw. I am expecting a piano at every gate featuring skillful renditions of mazurkas and nocturnes by the flight attendants. It should set me up nicely for my work in Ukraine (see Village Crawl in Ukraine).

* University-trained musicians love long names and ‘networks.’ Perhaps they felt the need to expand it out because there are already quite a few things named ‘soundcarrier’ floating around on the web, including a maker of amplifiers and a band.

Village crawl in Ukraine

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Now that I’ve exhausted myself jumping around my condo, I am calm enough announce that I was awarded my very first Canada Council grant! I’ll be traveling to the motherland (Ukraine) this fall to research Ukrainian folksong and experience it first hand. I’ll be living in Kyiv and going on short trips to villages to meet singers, record their songs and sing with them. I will also join one of the ensembles that specialize in authentic performance of folksong. I hope that through singing I can better understand the different tuning systems, the slinky vocal ornaments and the unique way of using the voice common to this practice.

This research will result in a couple of new pieces. One will be a song (or set of songs) for Calgary-based soprano Edith Pritchard. I am hoping to track down some possibly folk-inspired modern poetry for this while I’m in Ukraine. The second will be a piece for The Thin Edge New Music Collective’s Wind, keys and strings tour (which will include a performance in Vancouver in early February).

Ukrainian folksong has been an important influence in my work over the last five years, so I am extremely excited to have this opportunity to experience it first hand. I am currently finishing up a chamber opera inspired by this practice, entitled On the Eve of Ivan Kupalo. I will be blogging about this experience regularly in the fall so check back for updates!

All the images in this post are from the Lira Surma, a collection of Ukrainian folksong, which first appeared in early 20th century and has been reprinted several times in different countries. I own a black-and-white version released in the States (can be purchased here) and was really excited to find the original edition at the University of Alberta library. Here all the section title pages are in colour and so are the first songs in each section. The cover is hand-embroidered.