When Ukrainian Music Wasn’t Under Threat, It Thrived

In late March, a month after his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, decried what he called “the West’s Russophobia.”

Laying the blame on an encroachment of so-called cancel culture and sanctions imposed in response to the war, he claimed that Western countries were “attempting to erase a thousand years of culture” in Russia. To support his dubious claims, Putin pointed to instances of Western European and American orchestras dropping performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff — even though many of these composers are hardly wanting for attention on the world’s biggest stages.

Since the invasion began, the question of whether to perform music by Russian composers in the shadow of Putin’s war has been debated, with arguments both in favor of and against cancellations. Yet for some Ukrainians, these discussions miss the point.

As one Ukrainian online petition argued, the history of composers like Shostakovich, who was censured by the Soviet musical apparatus, has long overshadowed parallel — and often more violent — repressions against Ukrainian composers. Under the Czar, and then later the Soviet regime, Ukraine’s robust and diverse musical traditions — including Cossack songs and Romani music — were heavily regulated (and, at times, censored entirely) by the authorities. More recently, Putin has outright denied the existence of a unique Ukrainian culture.

For a brief period of time in the early 20th century, however, Ukrainian composers enjoyed a dearth of regulatory oversight from Russian or Soviet powers. Between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, the city of Kyiv was a hotbed for modernist music and experimentation — often, with a particularly Ukrainian twist.

Ukrainian composers at the turn of the century, many of them rooted in the Russian Orthodox choral tradition, wrote more for choir than any other ensemble. Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), who earned the title of “father of Ukrainian music,” spent the first several decades of his professional life collecting and arranging Ukrainian folk songs, many of which he later incorporated into his original compositions. His choral works helped to forge a distinctly Ukrainian sound. Some — such as “Prayer for Ukraine,” which the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York performed on “Saturday Night Live” shortly after the start of the Russian invasion — gained prominence in both religious and civic spheres. And his output provided the foundation for Ukrainian musical education in the years to come.

Church vocal traditions, said Liuba Morozova, a music critic and the artistic director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, helped in uniting Ukrainian composition under a national banner in the early 20th century. “Choral culture,” she explained, “was given an important place by both the Ukrainian People’s Republic” — an independent country that existed from 1917-20 — “and the Soviet government in the 1920s.”

It was a student of Lysenko’s, however, who made the biggest impression in Kyiv’s choral scene. Mykola Leontovych, born in Vinnytsia in 1877, picked up where his teacher left off by setting a cappella folk songs and drawing from national forms of poetry and prose. Through imitation, counterpoint and attentive orchestration, Leontovych brought the sounds of the Ukrainian nation to a broader public. His most popular arrangement, “Shchedryk” (1912), is better known to Anglophone audiences as the “Carol of the Bells,” but his settings of 19th-century poems by Taras Shevchenko show a deep understanding for vocal timbre and color.

Leontovych’s more dramatic works emulated the tradition of the Kobzars, the Ukrainian bards and history bearers who accompanied themselves on the bandura, a multistringed plucked instrument similar to a zither. Kobzars, the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky said in a phone interview, constituted some of the earliest experiments in Ukrainian musical sovereignty. Their poetry brought Ukraine’s past into dialogue with its present, and as such posed an ideological challenge to Russian colonial power.

Their national identity was lost on neither the Czar nor the Soviets, both of whom regulated the genre extensively. By the 1930s, the Stalinist regime had carried out mass executions of bandura players throughout the country. At the end of the preceding decade, Sonevytsky said, there were at least 300 bandurists registered in Ukraine. After 1936, there were four.

Leontovych also paid the ultimate price for his patriotism. In January 1921, he was shot in his sleep by the Soviet secret police.

His death, however, did little to scare others in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, into submission. In the wake of his murder, the city’s musical community gathered to form a society in his honor. The Leontovych Musical Society, organized less than two weeks after his murder, brought together composers, musicians, critics and folklorists to explore a specifically Ukrainian style of the modernism in vogue across Western Europe at the time. Led by the composer Borys Lyatoshynsky, the society sponsored hundreds of ensembles, pedagogical initiatives and discussions dedicated to Ukrainian music. It provided many of the city’s young composers with an opportunity for aesthetic and ideological experimentation.

The music that came out of the Leontovych Society during its seven-year existence was inventive and provocative. With intense orchestration and complex harmonies, Lyatoshynsky’s music drew on the modernism of composers like Bartok and Berg while incorporating national idioms. His Second String Quartet, composed in 1922, is a 25-minute work that draws on atonal harmonies, extended techniques and miniature leitmotifs to trace a dramatic trajectory from a wall of sound to a crooked folk dance. Levko Revutsky, another composer with the society, fused traditional melodies with innovations in craft — such as in his Second Symphony, from 1927, which sets folk songs into dialogue with sweeping, impressionistic harmonies. It won first place that year in the society’s competition to honor the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution.

In collaborating with visual artists, writers, academics and directors, the Leontovych Society joined a robust experimental scene in Kyiv. Among those who worked with the composers was Les Kurbas, a film and stage director whose Berezil Theater, founded in 1922, staged ambitious plays from around the world in abstract multimedia productions. For Kurbas, music was the linchpin for his synthetic art, which used rhythm and melody as a sort of pace-keeper for the action onstage. Berezil drew hundreds of partners and admirers from across the Soviet Union.

Popularity, however, was not enough to shield Kurbas from state repression. Like many other members of the Executed Renaissance, a group of Ukrainian artists and writers, he eventually fell victim to Stalin’s political ideology. In 1933, he was imprisoned in a labor camp in northern Russia. On Nov. 3, 1937, he was fatally shot.

But by 1928, upheaval in the nascent Soviet musical apparatus began to have repercussions throughout Ukraine. The Leontovych Society had found a corollary in the Association for Contemporary Music, an organization based in Moscow that sought to merge modernist idioms with revolutionary ideals. The association was even headed by a composer of Ukrainian origin, Nikolai Roslavets, who had worked extensively in both countries. He had served for nearly a decade as the dean of composition at the Kharkiv Conservatory, where he developed his unique system of tone organization. Upon moving to Moscow in 1922, Roslavets continued his futurist experiments in sound, the music theorist Inessa Bazayev said in an interview, adding that he did so while advocating a diversity of musical styles among the young Soviet avant-garde.

At the same time, however, a rival faction in the capital, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, was calling for compositional techniques that remained intelligible, engaging and edifying for a modern socialist listener.

The two organizations battled it out for several years, all while Stalin’s government increasingly cracked down on modernist culture. In 1932, they were both dissolved, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musician’s aesthetic values formed the basis for the Union of Soviet Composers. Roslavets was exiled to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he conducted a secondary school band for two years. The state increasingly censored and censured modernist music, with composers often facing dire consequences if accused of what it saw as Western decadence. The Leontovych Music Society — as well as its successor, the All-Ukrainian Society of Revolutionary Musicians — was all but lost to history.

A group of Ukrainian musicians and critics, however, are working to change that, with efforts like Ukrainian Live Classic, an initiative for the promotion of Ukrainian classical music around the world. Containing the scores and sounds of Ukraine across the past several centuries, the organization’s smartphone app serves as a sort of digital repository of the country’s musical history. As the whole world has its eyes on the country, the initiative allows artists and scholars outside Ukraine to perform and learn about this music.

And narratives matter, perhaps now more than ever. “The idea that ‘culture is beyond politics,’” Morozova, the music critic, said, “has long been promoted by those who put culture at the service of ideology and war crimes.” Performing music by canonical composers like Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich, she suggested, obscures the realities of Putin’s Russia. Instead, she argued, their music has become a sort of “cultural weapon” that serves to “make Russia attractive to Europeans.”

Ukraine’s absence from stages and scholarship from Western Europe and the United States is a product of these politics, Sonevytsky, the ethnomusicologist, said. “This is an excellent moment to think about why we attach the term ‘greatness’ to Russian, but not Ukrainian, culture,” she said. “There is a kind of exceptionalism that empires produce and make seem virtuous that smaller countries, depicted as the ‘threatening nationalists’ on the border, are denied. So why do we only know composers who we consider to be ‘great Russian’ composers?”

She paused, letting out a deep sigh, then added: “It’s all Russian soft power on the global stage.”

Gabrielle Cornish is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, where she researches experimental music in the Soviet Union after Stalin.