Interview: Composer Larysa Kuzmenko

Larysa Kuzmenko is a Toronto-based composer and pianist who teaches at the University of Toronto and the Glenn Gould School. Her music has been performed by the Winnipeg Symphony, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Vesnivka Choir and others, and has been broadcast in Canada and the world.  New Pathway’s Olena Wawryshyn spoke to Kuzmenko about her music, career and Ukrainian background. Excerpts from her work, Songs of Lilith, based on the mythical first wife of Adam, will be performed by Mooredale Concerts in Toronto at the Willowdale United Church on November 25 and at Walter Hall, University of Toronto on November 26.   

 NP: How did your piece, Songs of Lilith, come about?

LK: Mooredale Concerts commissioned it.  It was Christine Bogyo (Mooredale’s Artistic Director) who suggested it.  She went to the Canadian music centre and they gave her piles of women composers’ music. Mine was at the bottom and they said: “There’s one more left,” and she listened to my music and said, “that’s the composer.”

The music is in two parts essentially. There’s a section that is string quartet and English horn, so a quintet; and the other part is pure string quartet. It’s a multi-media concept. Lilian Broca has been painting Lilith and Adam and Eve for ten years.  So we had her paintings that related to the story that [Canadian writer] Joy Kogawa wrote that an actress read, then my music would be performed. 

I read the story by Joy and when I was writing the music I was inspired but what was happening in the text and in the painting visually. I wanted to write music that was quite organic to the text and to the painting so when you have a picture of Lilith becoming a viper, a snake, that triggered a certain kind of music that I wanted to write, a slithery evil setting.

 NP: What inspires you to compose music?

LK: I like programmatic ideas, a story. I get a theme and compose something based on that theme. If I have something that moves me, I write better. For example, when my dad passed away I wrote a piece called Prayer for Strings and incorporated the Ukrainian Orthodox church theme, Vichnaya Pamyiat.  When the priest responds with the choir, the cello responds with the rest of the orchestra. In the part [about] the moment of death, all the instruments swell together, then open into a consonant high sound, like the spirit going to heaven.  So I visualize pictorial things when I compose music. It’s almost like I’m painting or telling a story.

 NP: You travelled to Ukraine with your husband, the Toronto-born Ukrainian-Canadian composer Gary Kulesha, in the early 1990s. Have you been there since?

LK: No, but, the experience was tremendous. The musicians there were just so talented. The performances were great. The people were lovely. The food was good. I loved it. We both loved it, but it was the travelling, going through Moscow and having to take a plane to Lviv, and being awake for 36 hours, that was just a little too much. Maybe it’s easier now because we didn’t have a direct flight and were very tired.

 NP: Where were you born?

LK: In Toronto in a car on Bathurst Street, in front of the Ukrainian Orthodox church.  It just happened right there in that spot when my dad was driving.  It was very strange. But, I grew up in Mississauga.

 NP: When did you start composing?

LK: When I was 7.  It about after an experience: my dad taking me to Niagara Falls and asked me to stand on a stone wall. He didn’t realize I had a fear of heights and I thought I was going to fall into the falls. I came home that day, extremely upset, and I wanted to express how I felt, and I wrote a piece, The Fall.  I played it for my class, (it was in C minor and there was a shakey part in it) and that just triggered it. I thought: “Being a creator is great, as I can express my emotions this way. Maybe people can understand me through my music.

 NP: How did you discover your interest in music?

LK: My sister is 10 years older than me, and our friends were leaving to go to the United States so they gave us their piano. My sister was 14. She was allowed to have piano lessons (my parents could only afford for her to study), and I was only four.  But, I picked up playing the piano by ear, and I didn’t want anyone to know. Every Friday when my parents went shopping, I would play my sister’s music by ear. One day, my parents came home, and I didn’t hear them, and they thought my sister was playing –and it was me.  So, then they thought it would be best if I got proper lessons.

 NP: Do you have a musical family?

LK: There might be some musical background in my family,  but, I don’t know because my mother is an orphan because of the Famine that occurred in Ukraine in 1933. Her whole family died– 7 brothers and sisters.

Both of my parents were born in Ukraine.  After the war they got married, and my sister was born in Germany. Then they moved to Australia. My dad was looking for his father, and he found him in Toronto, and that is why they moved here. 

 NP: In addition to composing, you have played piano professionally. Tell me about this aspect of your career.

LK: Yes, I toured in England, played in Carnegie Hall, twice and at other concert halls with orchestras. With the orchestras, I often played the Grieg Concerto and the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, and a lot of new music and Canadian premieres. I also did a recital with Roksolana Roslak, who is a fabulous [opera] singer.

 NP: You wrote a piece about the Ukrainian Famine called Voice of Hope for soprano and string orchestra, which was premiered in 2003. Why did you give this piece a hopeful title?

LK: So that hopefully this will not happen again, that someone like Stalin will never be once again, and there will be hope for people in Ukraine, that they will learn from this or get out from this type of thing and be strong again.

When I was writing it, I could almost feel the horror of the Famine. It is as if the pen wrote itself.  My hand was writing the music because I could feel the emotions, the horror of all the stories my mother told me and the nights that she would be crying at home. She used to cry over her family a lot.

I guess the hope is that there are people who survived. My mum survived. She survived famine, yet she didn’t want to live after my dad died. He meant so much to her.

I also wrote a solo piano piece, In Memoriam: To the Victims of Chornobyl. [It was released on CD by pianist Christina Petrowska in 1998 and toured by her in New York City, China, and Taiwan.] There is hope in that too.  

 NP: What are you working on now?

LK: This year, I’ve been teaching 40 hours a week, and I will be working on a cello piece for Christine Bogyo, who is a cellist. She came up with the ideas–she’s Hungarian so would like me to write a rhapsody. And, there is a concert coming up in April: Andrew Burashko will be playing my piano concerto with the Hannaford Silver Band in Toronto.