Hutsul master Mykhailo Tafiychuk demonstrates the trombita.

The great strength of Maria Sonevytsky’s excellent Wild music is the way she binds urban popular genres closely with the constantly changing social and political life of Ukraine. While she shows how avtentyka and etnomuzyka performers remould “traditional” rural cultures, the latter are not her main topic; and indeed (typically?), such local musicking, submerged under glossy media representations, may seem to have become vestigial.

Still, as a rank outsider (as with my impertinent forays into many areas of world music, largely untrammelled by any knowledge of the subject) I’m prompted to explore online sites to seek some sonic soundmarks, and to suggest the kind of fieldwork practised by Sonevytsky’s mentors.

Given that most folk musicking is based in life-cycle and calendrical rituals, I’m sorry that few of the tracks below provide much social context—online clips often tend towards the fakeloric. But a home video like this, from a 2004 village wedding in Kolomyja county, Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, has a good honest feeling (and talking of avtentyka, even the weather is authentic):

For singing (largely “salvage” initiatives), note the videos on the Tree website, and the Polyphony project (website; YouTube channel). Sonevytsky herself collaborated in the Chornobyl songs project (2011), based on the long-term fieldwork of Yevhen Yefremov.

Here’s a solo kolomyjky song accompanied by fiddle at the summer solstice festival, also from Ivano-Frankivsk:

Some iconic instruments of the Hutsul people of the highlands in west Ukraine:

• the long trembita horns (played over the wider Carpathian region) that gained fleeting celebrity with Ruslana’s winning Eurovision song in 2004 (see Wild music): here’s an introduction by the great Hutsul master Mykhailo Tafiychuk:

Here three trembitas accompany a funeral in 2009:

For funerals, see e.g. here.

I’m still on the lookout for material on the surma shawm—clues welcome.

• the tsymbaly hammered dulcimer is shown in the wedding above—in this 1992 clip it plays with fiddle and bass:

(cf. zithers of Iran and Turkey, Korea and China, Alpine).

• the sopilka (among several types of wooden end-blown flute):

• mol’far shamans with their drymba jews harp—demonstrated by Mikhail Nechay in 1991:

and here he is in 2009, interviewed by Maria Sonevytsky:

• the duda / volynka bagpipe, again demonstrated by Mykhailo Tafiychuk:

(I’ve given some leads to bagpipes elsewhere under Vermeer, south Italy, the Rioja, and so on.)

• Three short scenes with the Tafiychuk family:

and at a festival performance:

Click here for a discography of the Tafiychuks.

• For early recordings of immigrant communities in New York and New Jersey (cf. the companion disc at the end of Folk traditions of Poland), here’s Ukrainian village music: historic recordings 1928-1933 (playlist):

And here’s a 1951 Folkways LP:

• For the Crimean Tatars, here’s the first of three compilations on the emblematic qaytarma 7/8 dance (“traditional”, followed by “modern” and “retro” lists):

* * *

While folk musical activity changes constantly along with society (cf. Society and soundscape, and Musics lost and found), all this may remind us that it survives not merely in the commodified representations of urbanites; and that in Ukraine, to paraphrase its national anthem, rural culture is not dead yet.

For more readings on the history of modern Ukraine, click here. See also Ukraine: liturgy.
Cf. Folk traditions of Poland (indeed, Stanisław Mierczyński did fieldwork among the Hutsuls from 1934 to 1938); and Musical cultures of east Europe.

Returning to the Polyphony project for Ukraine, I suspect many people of my generation love this clip because it’s just the kind of chat we have with our own friends: