Ukrainian Avant Garde Music on CD

By Denis Hlynka

When one thinks of Ukrainian music, it is most likely in the very traditional domain of folk dance and folk song, and possibly some variant of the contemporary rock band. Seldom does the average listener pay attention to the fact that Ukrainian influence on avant-garde new music has added significantly to the genre, both in terms of performance and composition. While in the field of visual arts, Ukrainian Canadians are beginning to recognize the names of Malevich, Burliuk, Archipenko and Palmov, in contemporary music one is hard put to produce an equal list.

Hidden among the new releases of mainstream contemporary classical new music, is a CD that might normally skip the attention of those interested in both 20th Century avant-garde music and Ukrainian music. This budget CD (approximately $10) features 69 minutes of the music of Nikolai Roslavets as performed by Solomia Soroka.

Solomia Soroka comes from Lviv, and now works in the US. As the program notes for the CD explain: “Born in Lviv, Solomia Soroka studied at the Music Academy of Ukraine, and earned her Doctorate at the Eastman School of Music in the United States. She made her solo debut with the Lviv Philharmonic at the age of ten with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto…She has given premieres of several important contemporary Ukrainian works… Solomia Soroka studied with Hersh Heifetz, Kotorovych, Zvirko, and Castleman, and is a professor at Goshen College.”

Nikolai Roslavets, is normally considered a “Russian” composer. Whatever one chooses to call him, he certainly has Ukrainian connections. He was born in Dushatino, Ukraine in 1881, and between 1917 and 1924, he was professor and music director of the Kharkiv Conservato-ry, and head of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Roslavets is being re-discovered today, having been lost in the hectic times of Soviet repression. In 1929, his experimental contemporary style fell into political disfavour and he was declared “an enemy of the people”. He moved briefly to Tashkent (Uzbekistan), then spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity in Moscow.

Two of the works on this CD were apparently composed while Roslavets lived and worked in Kharkiv. These are his Violin Sonata #4 (1919) and Three Dances (1923). Roslavets’ style is avant-garde and atonal. He was in contact with leading constructivist and futurist artists of the time, including Ukrainian Kasimir Malevich. Indeed, some critics describe his work as a musical interpretation of the aesthetic philosophies of Malevich and other futurists. Today he is considered a pioneer of atonal music.

Andrew Horton (Central Europe Review Vol 1, No 1, June 1999) writes “The music of Roslavets has been described as ‘Scriabin on acid’ and his complex system of synthetic chords, sound centres and rhythmoforms has earned him the title of ‘the Russian Schoemberg’, although he was actually Ukrainian.”

The cover of the CD is an eye-catching and appropriate contemporary faux futurist work by Bohdan Soroka titled The March of the Gnomes.

Today the defining lines of what is Russian music and what is Ukrainian music are becoming blurred since the break-up of the USSR. The Ukrainian element has been until now been buried and ignored by Western musicologists. Since 1991, a re-evaluation of such composers and works is taking place. While it was once fashionable to consider all such music as either Russian or Soviet, today scholars are beginning to look at the underlying influences of Ukrainian culture on contemporary world music. This CD adds to that increasing genre of such significant works.

Denis Hlynka, PhD heads the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba