Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky
overemphasizing the curative potentiality of musical aesthetics, and also to underscore the potency of the ideological apparatus that supports notions of aesthetic autonomy, of music as a sphere apart from the debased world of politics.
I also wish to note the irony of claiming that the Wildness of etno-muzyka has the potential to project futurity in the context of a post-Soviet state, with its legacy of Soviet cultural policies that mandated that music must always speak for the (glorious proletarian dictatorship of the) future. Lenin’s famous dictum that artworks should be “deeply implanted in the very thick of the laboring masses” (Nelson 2004, 220), in tandem with the socialist realist aesthetic norms codified under Stalin, demanded that Soviet artworks take inspiration from peasant and working class “folk” forms to generate the music of the socialist future. What is clearly different in this twenty-first-century scenario is that Ukrainians making etno-muzyka today conjure sovereign imaginaries without an ideological imperative from above (even if, as some of my examples show, some of the techniques by which sounds are utilized for political ends are similar to those used in the Soviet period).
Contemporary musical practices of etno-muzyka have afforded Ukrainians the opportunity to at once re-litigate the past while still projecting creative future paths forward. In the decade framed by two revolutions, sovereign imaginaries morph and multiply. In their Wildness, the inflamed rhetorics of post-Soviet ethno-nationalism splinter and enable new ideologies of affiliation, such as the pragmatic patriotism that has been most vocally supported by the small but growing middle and creative class of urban and cosmopolitan Ukrainians. For example, by the end of the revolutionary decade circumscribed in this book, a sovereign imaginary exists that centers on the ambiguous but powerful trope of “dignity” that became key to the rhetoric of the Maidan Revolution, also known as the “Revolution of Dignity.”
What dignity means, and how it maps onto the idealized liberal transcendental subject of European history, remains hotly disputed within Ukraine. But what is striking is that such a sovereign imaginary is not predicated on any of the traditional ideas associated with nationhood, such as ethnolinguistic unity, common culture, or shared history. Rather, it is premised on the inclusion of citizens deserving of dignity, who happen to be contained within the somewhat arbitrary sovereign borders of contemporary Ukraine. In this case, instead of exclusionary nationalist ideas of who deserves dignity and sovereign protection, Ukrainians are developing imaginative strategies through which affective ties can be generated across class, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gendered experience. What interests me is how such sovereign imaginaries are articulated through musical expressions of Wildness. This becomes apparent in the following example, when Ukrainian citizens at risk of losing their citizenship voiced emergent solidarities by wilding the national anthem.
WILDING THE ANTHEM
In 2014, in the destabilizing aftermath of the Maidan Revolution, I witnessed a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem—which bears the rather uninspiring (and, in 2014, dispiritingly apropos) title “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet”—where the communal embrace of discursive and relational Wildness enabled this most staid of song forms to resound with fresh political possibilities.
That summer, my husband, infant daughter, and I attended the ArtPóle (АртПоле) festival in a tiny Western Ukrainian village located approximately sixty battered kilometers from the nearest city of Ivano-Frankivsk. ArtPóle was held on the territory of a decommissioned Soviet kolkhoz (collective farm) turned festival space, picturesquely situated above the shore of the Dniester River, about a fifteen-minute walk from the small cluster of rural homesteads that comprised the center of the village. On festival weekends, Unizh, population 156, swelled to the low thousands. The festival ran for five days in July and featured musical groups from Finland, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Russia, Poland, and the UK, as well as Ukrainian acts from Kyiv, L’viv, and Crimea. Theatrical presentations, film screenings, children’s programs, and master classes filled out the schedule. That summer, the Ukrainian “land art” summer festival was in its twelfth and, unbeknownst to the organizers, last iteration. The ambiance that summer was noticeably subdued, with much smaller crowds than previous ArtPóle festivals that I had attended. When I inquired in casual conversation as to this apparent shift in mood, one of the organizers told me that this muted atmosphere was by design. In a year when, as she put it, “the entirety of Ukraine is depressed by the political situation,” it had felt wrong to stage the usual exuberant, large-scale event.17 In this context, the intermittent rain, which disrupted programming and further dampened the mood of organizers and attendees throughout the week, seemed especially fitting.
The previous year in Ukraine had been especially chaotic: the boisterous Maidan Revolution spilled over from the winter of 2013 into 2014 and turned violent, culminating in the murder of over one hundred protestors in central Kyiv by state forces and the abdication of the democratically elected president, a corrupt figure heavily indebted to the Russian government. The Russian mediasphere decried the uprising as a fascist takeover of the Ukrainian government, while most US and European media outlets breathlessly reported on the Ukrainian citizenry’s “revolution of dignity” (революція гідності).18 The spring brought the loss of Ukrainian territory to the Russian Federation: first, with the swift an nexation of the Crimean peninsula, and later, through Russian-backed separatist violence in the eastern border regions (the violent conflict there remains ongoing in 2019).19 The rapid deterioration of the political situation—from the euphoric highs of revolutionary possibility to the miserable lows of wartime—reverberated across all corners of Ukrainian society: the state was exposed as vulnerable, its sovereign borders indefensible against Russian aggression, its military embarrassingly under-equipped and understaffed. In Simferopol, Crimea, a Crimean Tatar friend—one of the Sunni Muslim Indigenous minority of the peninsula who were generally pro-Ukrainian—told me, “We understand now just how powerless we really are … and how vulnerable all of Ukraine is. We are abandoned by our state, and our state is abandoned by our world” (personal communication, June 14, 2015).
By the summer of 2014, the illegal annexation of Crimea appeared entrenched, at the very least, as a “frozen conflict” (Dunn and Bobick 2014; see also Charron 2016). In the eastern borderlands, Russian-backed “separatists” had announced the secession of the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” from the Ukrainian state.20 Russia welcomed these “new Russian” provinces into its orbit, depicting the separatists as heroic anti-fascist crusaders. Everyone I encountered that summer seemed preoccupied with the slow-boiling war at Ukraine’s borders. Even the youth-oriented music and culture festivals that had defined summer revelry in twenty-first-century Ukraine were not immune from the unfolding crisis.
At Artpóle in Unizh, the stated theme of the 2014 festival was “ornaments.” The press release—though ambiguous—lent itself to political interpretation:
Borders are lines. Lines delineate space. Lines connect points in space. Points and lines create ornamental patterns. Geometry borders on art. Your movement in space, a path, a line, is designated to imprint your movement (press release, 2014).
There was no question that Ukraine’s vulnerable borders motivated some of the programming for the festival, particularly on the festival’s Sunday evening program. The night was billed as an “Authentic Program” (Автентична Програма) featuring music from Crimea and the Carpathians, two borderland regions of Ukraine that loom prominently in Ukrainian imaginations of its internal Wildness. The evening featured back-to-back performances of two groups from these distinct regions. The first group were Hutsuls, the same population who inspired Ruslana’s “Wild Dances,” and who occupy the space of the Herderian ür-folk of Ukraine, with colorful traditional costumes, lively music, and a unique cosmology. The Hutsuls were followed by a trio of Crimean Tatar musicians, upon whom many ethnic Ukrainians and Russians project racialized Orientalist stereotypes (especially of a capacity for violence) due to their historical link to the Ottoman Empire and to the fact that they are neither Slavic nor Christian (with some few exceptions).21 The Crimean Tatar trio had traveled through the blockaded border to perform—illegally, in the eyes of the Russian state that now controlled the peninsula but had not yet forced them to surrender their Ukrainian