It stands I think as an obvious, even if not as of yet widely-appreciated fact that Ukraine possesses one of the great traditional music cultures on the planet.

To cast an initiating glance solely across the continent of Europe, only the traditional musics of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, as well as of some amalgamation of the closely knit-together musics of the various Balkan states can from my standpoint even begin to compete with what Ukrainian music has to offer.

And circling about to take up a more global view, I would say that there are no more than a handful of national music cultures [igh] that rise up to this same elevated level: a score of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa no doubt—Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and a few more—likewise a number of countries in North Africa and the Middle East—Morocco, Turkey and Iran come perhaps most readily to mind—and one of course cannot do otherwise but pay heed to the impossibly rich and complex panoply of musical life found on the Indian subcontinent. And as far as the rest of Asia goes, one would have to mention at the very least China, Japan and Indonesia.

Yet, even though Ukrainian traditional music is not at this time quite as well known as many of these national music cultures, there is no doubt in my mind that it is squarely amongst this eminent contingent that the music of Ukraine belongs.

This, among other things, is the case that this website aims to present. And make no mistake about it—as I will take pains to demonstrate herein—Ukraine is veritably bursting with musical talent [cdo].

This is so, however, not only in regards to the nation's traditional music sphere—though this traditional culture does indeed retain a remarkable degree of strength and relevancy in present-day Ukraine—but across a broad spectrum of musical forms and approaches now thriving across the land .

In the quarter century since the end of the Russo-Soviet captivity which kept the nation in relative isolation vis-a-vis the rest of the world, native versions of all of the primary modes of music-making that have dominated the so-called First World since the end of World War II have sprung up also in Ukraine: Contemporary Pop, Modern Jazz, Rock, Hip Hop, Electronica and so forth.

Yet—to spotlight what is actually my central theme here—what most impresses me about the contemporary Ukrainian music world is the manner in which its exceptionally powerful traditional music culture so often seeps into, and not infrequently utterly saturates, such a significant portion of the nation's music-making overall.

In other words, not only does there persist in today's Ukraine a very strong traditional music sphere, passionately committed to maintaining and carrying forward its traditions, one can also hear the vigorous impact of this sphere throughout the complete gamut of musical expression that Ukraine shares with the developed world at large. Into their music-making forays within the realms of Pop, Rock, Electronica, etc., so many Ukrainian musicians cannot help it would seem but take along with them various strains and elements stemming from the traditional music sphere.

And in this manner, then, it might be said that its traditional music culture serves as a sort of underlying connecting thread in the Ukrainian music world, a common, affiliating, centripetal nexus that winds its way through much of its music-making endeavors, imparting to its musical life as a whole its distinctive, indelible savor.

It is above all this particular quality, therefore—not just the abiding strength and vitality of Ukraine's traditional music culture, but the way in which this traditional culture interfuses its powerful influence into the better part of the nation's contemporary music-making—that I will be chiefly concerned with in this exploration of Ukrainian music-making.

I am calling this an opinionated exploration, incidentally, in that my guidepost and touchstone in all this will mostly be my own sensibility and judgment. Although I will often enough take note of the climate of opinion within Ukraine itself, I don't spend a whole lot of time in deferring to the aesthetic estimations of others, or to what happens to be the prevailing points of view on such matters, but rely instead mainly on my own assessments in determining what to pay attention to and what to commend.

There will unavoidably be any number of worthwhile artists I will neglect to mention; one cannot include everyone and everything, after all. The majority of what I will be dealing with, though, will in one way or another exemplify the particular quality just described—that of a mighty and ancient tradition that compellingly undergirds and informs a diverse wealth of current-day manifestations—and it will indeed be this quality more than anything else that serves as the overarching criterion I will be operating under.

I should make clear, however, that there are some additional, although interlinked perspectives through which I will be looking at things, and this would probably be a good place to lay these out:

First of all, the way in which I am examining music-making as a social activity in the contemporary developed world revolves around the notion that such music-making can be broken down into three distinct, albeit frequently overlapping or intersecting societal domains or areas of endeavor, which I designate as “Art”, “Commercial”, and “Vernacular”. Although such domains do roughly correlate with particular styles or categories of music, they do so on the whole in very complex, crisscrossing ways, which I can only briefly touch on here.

Hence: The “Art” domain can be understood as for the most part parallel to the “Classical music” realm, although this domain typically encompasses Jazz too, as well as other types of music. There is additionally a category I deal with at length on this site via its important role in contemporary Ukrainian music that can be labeled “Avant Populist” which, even though it is more or less a “Commercial” form, can be said in some of its traits to overlap or intersect with the “Art” domain.

Likewise, some of the most outstanding examples of current-day Ukrainian music I will be pointing up for acclamation here represent traditional music that might more usually belong to the “Vernacular” domain, but that have in effect been subjected to a transformation by being imported to an extent into the “Art” domain.

The “Commercial” domain, then, as one might expect, is meant to denote the commercially-directed sector of music-making, and therefore does correspond in the main to the category of “popular music”; there are notwithstanding nuances at work here that render this correspondence not absolutely exact either. Indeed, it might be claimed that the tendency on the part of certain styles of “popular music” to incorporate elements of “traditional music” can actually position such styles at least partially within the “Vernacular” domain of music-making, even while remaining for all intents and purposes predominantly “Commercial”.

And lastly, the “Vernacular” domain can be defined quite succinctly as pertaining to “music-making by ordinary people” [kbl].

What I have in mind by this somewhat uncertain phrase—“music-making by ordinary people”—is the following: A manner of musical practice that does not principally take place in accordance with either some well-defined a priori set of artistic principles, enacted by way of intensely meticulous specialist training, most often within elite academic institutions—as usually obtains as a requisite matter of course in the “Art” domain—nor to the mass market demands as well as mass society expectations that the commercial music industry entails [dvx]—which stands as the primary determinative factors for music-making in the “Commercial” domain—but proceeds rather in terms of an entirely different set of values, based among other things on much more horizontal-oriented social relationships [trt], and on much more informal and immediate social formations.

And what I am referring to as “traditional music culture” does tend to be mostly congruent with the “Vernacular” domain, yet as just indicated, aspects of “traditional music culture” can take place within the “Art” domain, as well as within the “Commercial” domain. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that not by any means does all music-making in the “Vernacular” domain necessarily feature “traditional music”.

This manner of breaking down music-making practices into a tripartite structure is certainly not original with myself, I should note—it is in fact a common schema that a number of music scholars have adopted. To give just two examples: Both the British semiotician/musicologist Phillip Tagg, as well as the American music historian J. Wiley Hitchcock have put forward versions of this sort of tripartite structure [p]. My own take agrees with certain aspects of these precedents, while critically differing with others, but I can only present a very abbreviated delineation of it here.

Perhaps the best way to convey my thinking would be by way of a diagrammatic illustration. To wit: Imagine two columns set off against each other, the first column on the left comprised of the three “domains” I just specified—“Art”, “Commercial”, and “Vernacular”—and the second column on the right, the three basic types of music I mentioned—“Classical”, “Popular” and “Traditional”.

One could get all “essentialist”, “Aristotelian” or “teleological” [ncb] about this and posit that the basic types of music on the right hand side most completely fulfill their essential nature when they are most completely operating within the “domain” or “area of endeavor” directly across on the left hand side—i.e., a “Classical” mode of music would stand in entire fulfillment of its essential nature by being wholly enacted inside the “Art” domain.

This, however, would really distort how these entities more often than not interact with one another in the world. The better, more illuminative way in which to see things is to consider that any particular piece of music, or any particular identifying “sound”, could be thought to realize its overall “sound character” through the particular admixture of categories that occur on each side, as well as through the complex fashion in which the two sides connect up with one another. A particular “sound character”, that is to say, is directly formed through some specific admixture of basic types of music on the one side, in conjunction with how this configuration correlates or interfaces with a particular admixture of “domains” on the other.

What this assumes, therefore, is that a “sound character” is not only the result of a certain music type or combination of music types, but also of the societal “domain” (or combination of “domains”) that this is enacted within—for indeed, it is the societal “domain” in which a particular act of music-making occurs that really defines the whole orientation and general disposition towards things that a piece of music maintains.

As a quick and compact example, I would refer back to the situation just alluded to, in which a piece of traditional music (which as it happens, might possibly also contain ancillary elements of “Popular” or even “Classical” musics) would in fact take on an altogether different “sound character” if it was endeavored within the “Art” domain than it would within either the “Vernacular” or “Commercial” domain.

Moreover, although there are definitely many “essentialist” instances in which a piece of music that unambiguously conforms to a particular “basic type” on one side is wholly enacted within one and only one “domain” on the other—this would indeed account for most “Classical” music-making, and a certain amount of “Popular” and “Traditional” music-making as well—it is nonetheless just as frequent, if not more customary the case that an act of music-making involves some complex diversity of elements drawn from the “basic types” on the one side, operating in tandem with some complex blending of “domains” on the other (although to be sure, it is generally one category on each side that predominates).

In any event, without getting too much deeper into the weeds on all this, suffice it to say that although this whole schema I just laid out will come into play quite frequently in what follows, it's also worth emphasizing that the larger part of the music I will be eulogizing and celebrating in this exploration of Ukrainian music will in fact manifest a strong relationship with the “Vernacular” domain, for reasons I also want to briefly review here:

In his work Sound Effects, the music writer Simon Frith relates that “[t]he assumption of an unproblematic relationship between social experience and musical expression works well enough in cultures in which everyone, in one way or another, practices music...In [such mass participatory] musical cultures people learn the language through using it—they know how musical meaning is made because they make it themselves” (p. ??).

The larger matter that Frith happens to be alluding to here is the problem of meaning that arises in societies in which music is primarily mass-produced for commercial purposes. Rather than being made by “ordinary people”, in other words, musical production tends to be the purview of specialized professionals whose music making activities are chiefly geared towards commercial objectives. And in so far as it is the case that such specialized, market-oriented professionals are responsible for most music making in such cultures, it has to be acknowledged that musical meaning for the social body in general can only arise by way of the consumption of music. And this, furthermore, has to be seen as inevitably limiting in some appreciable measure the capacity for “ordinary people” to have an impact on what music means.

As Frith notes, though, this problem is pretty much obviated in cultures in which music making so permeates social life, and is thus practiced by such a wide range of its populace, that musical meaning is simply felt to be of a piece with, inextricably connected to broader social experience.

And indeed, what the passage above describes is in a sense the ideal intrinsic to the horizontal orientation that grounds the “Vernacular” domain—a culture in which nearly everyone has a direct connection of some sort to music making.

It would no doubt be an exaggeration to say that Ukrainian culture lives up to this ideal in wholly unmitigated, unqualified fashion; it nonetheless seems to me the case that music making does permeate the social life of Ukrainians to a remarkable degree—it does at least seem to be the case that there is a really astonishing amount of music making going on in Ukraine on every level [hnj]—the consequence of which is that musical meaning in Ukraine does indeed bear a very powerful connection to lived social experience, in a manner that I think is quite unusual for the contemporary developed world.

To frame this in the specific terminology I just delineated, it seems clear to me that the “Vernacular” domain in the Ukrainian music making world is uncommonly strong and bountiful, and one of the ways this is manifested (although it is not the only way) is in the prominent role that Ukrainian traditional music plays in its musical life, not only in terms of the thriving traditional music sphere itself, but also—to re-state in a different way what I've already articulated above—in terms of that segment of Ukrainian popular music (and this would be inclusive of what I identify as the “Avant Populist” wing, too) that ventures to incorporate substantial strains and elements from traditional music.

Expect this “Vernacular” attribute, at any rate, to be underscored again and again in the ensuing.

Before finally moving on, though, I want to add that another reason it seemed worthwhile to detail my thinking on all this is that this intricate schema actually serves as a good basis for fomenting appreciation for yet one more thing that I find extraordinary about the Ukrainian music-making world, and that is the sheer aptitude and ease that a considerable number of Ukrainian musicians seem to be able to shift from one “domain” to another, and from one “basic type” of music to another.

This sort of adroit fluidity is likely related I think to something else I observed, which is the tight, almost familial closeness of the Ukrainian music-making world. That is to say, it definitely struck me as I was exploring this world—which in fact took place largely through the wonderful world of YouTube videos—how frequently I came across various artists in one manner of musical project who would then turn up in any number of completely different kinds of projects. Moreover, a few exceptional artists kept popping up again and again in this way, floating about through a great range of diverse projects.

I would guess that to a certain extent, this manner of “synergistic interconnectivity”, as I call it, is a function of the significant centrality that the capital city of Kyiv enjoys in Ukrainian cultural life [ghj]—a substantial part of what I will be focused on here either happens in Kyiv, or else stems from there—but I believe to no small degree it is also the product of a quite admirable openness and agile multifariousness, as it might be put, not to mention a complete lack of snobbery or haughty pretentiousness, that I see in the Ukrainian music-making world overall. The sort of rigidifying conventionality that in many other societies keep such social forms separated seems to hold much less sway in Ukraine.

And, it strikes me as also very interesting and telling that it tends to be precisely those musicians in Ukraine who possess strong roots in and/or engagement with the traditional music sphere that manifest these qualities of openness and “multifarious” stylistic diversity most of all.

That is to say, quite to the contrary of what some might thoughtlessly assume to be the case, on the basis of false, prejudicial stereotypes—that those involved in the Ukrainian traditional music sphere may perhaps amount to little more than rigid, closeminded völkisch drones—I have found that a great many Ukrainian musicians who are or were in the past active in the traditional music sphere very often prove themselves at the same time to be both exceptionally adept at, and enthusiastically inclined towards the largest diversity of other musical approaches [yxt].

Furthermore, this “synergistic interconnectivity” for what it's worth also provides a convenient way in which to organize this “exploration”: As there exists so many points of connection between one musician and another, and between one musical project and another—pull on one bit of string, as it were, and any number of concomitant portions of the larger fabric get tugged along with it—it is as if there was a preexistent structure already laid out, ready and waiting for me to simply notice and make proper use of.

One can count on it, in any case, that in continuing on here, all of the foregoing are matters I will hark back to as frequently as the situation warrants.

Secondarily (and more controversially I expect), another line of thinking that definitely impacts how I am evaluating things has to do with my sense that, setting aside for the moment the substantial portion of Ukrainian music that has managed to successfully incorporate substantial traditional strains into its mode of expression, a not inconsiderable degree of what has attained popularity in the Ukrainian music world instead falls under a rubric I refer to as “Us Too!” music.

Thus, as it was the case that Ukrainians, through absolutely no fault of their own, came fairly late in the day to what I refer to as the post-War Global Popular Music Revolution—in fact, from my outlook they arrived only subsequent to the point that the historic post-War groundswell of creative energies propelling this revolution had effectively peaked—what a good deal of Ukrainian music-making in the period that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Imperium actually amounted to was not merely “playing catch up”, but playing catch up in a game in which it was no longer within the realm of possibility to obtain a place amongst the creative vanguard.

In other words, Ukrainian music-making in the popular music sphere at least, has been mostly a matter of engaging with, absorbing, and learning how to take part in this Global Pop Revolution, acquiring thereby all the forms and approaches comprising that revolution that the Soviet enthrallment had up to that moment preventing Ukrainians from fully delving into. Yet, in that this process occurred only after what in my judgment represented the peak years of the Global Pop Revolution—which I feel began at some point in the early to mid 1950s, and then began its steady, inexorable decline thereabouts the early to mid 1980s at the latest, if not a half decade or more previous [b]—it was an unfortunate inevitability that whatever contributions Ukrainians have been able to make to the Global Pop discourse could not ever be capable of attaining to the highest levels of seminal creativity.

Again, it is not that there has been anything deficient in the quality of Ukrainian popular music necessarily, it is merely a matter of having arrived at the wrong time, at a point in which the Golden Age of global popular music had begun to wind down, falling off into an era of diminishing returns [i].

Therefore, although I will definitely take note of some exceptions to this, there is just not that much of this “Us Too!” Ukrainian popular music—which to be clear, I am defining as Ukrainian versions of the standard modes and approaches common to everyone taking part in the global pop music conversation—that I am especially favorable towards. And this is not, once more, so much because such music tends to be badly done—most often this isn't the case—but rather that it has already been done, over and over again by a great many others, from all across the planet in fact, such that there simply isn't that much left to do within this standard popular music discourse that still has the capacity to decisively stand out, creatively speaking.

So, in a sense, this is yet another way of making the same argument I voiced above—that what I find most worthwhile in the current-day Ukrainian music world, in addition to its still robust and ever-prodigious traditional music culture, is that music that manages to employ the common languages, the modes and approaches shared by all who take part in the global pop project, while at the same time undertaking to creatively infiltrate this shared discourse with the peculiar aspects and qualities that derive from the nation's traditional music [ug].

Thus, although it is not the case that every instance of Ukrainian popular music that incorporates strains and elements from Ukrainian traditional music is in my opinion by that virtue alone deserving of praise—and that by the same token, a definite quantity of Ukrainian popular music that doesn't have much of anything to do with traditional music can I believe be affirmed as unquestionably laudable—it does nonetheless happen to be the case that much of the popular music that strikes me as consisting of secondhand and uninventive “Us Too!” music tends to be overly derivative, especially of American music [nm], and thus consequently tends to forgo any deep engagement with Ukrainian music traditions.

It seems to me, indeed, that too many Ukrainian artists seeking to enter the global pop music realm have been so concerned with simply securing a seat at the table, as it were, that they haven't stopped to consider what is was that they themselves were capable of bringing to the table. Of course, if whatever they might have to contribute happened to be of little value, then I suppose it would make sense to not particularly concentrate on this. Yet, as it is the case that what Ukrainians can bring to the table are offerings from one of the great traditional music cultures on the planet, I can't help but think it a shame when this great tradition is not made sufficient use of.

In any event, readers might just regard this as still another attempt at fair warning, for those particularly inclined to take such matters to heart, that the greater bulk of music I will be nudging forward for commendation and celebration in this decidedly opinionated exploration will not necessarily be the music that is at this moment most popular in Ukraine itself—a fair portion of which I do feel amounts to derivative and uninspired “Us Too!” music—but rather is music that again, has found the means in one way or another to creatively engage with this great, and still greatly unsung, traditional music culture.

Rather than an “Us Too!” music, what such music exemplifies to me, in fine, is an approach which has effectively internalized the most vital elements that make up the common idioms and dialects of the global pop conversation, and then proceeds to utilize these elements to create not merely another version of what everyone else has done, and/or is still doing, but rather something new, something unique, that in point of fact adds something to the global conversation that wasn't there before, at least in part by bringing into this conversation aspects and qualities belonging to Ukraine's native traditions.

And, as this move of incorporating—or for that matter, simply carrying over—aspects and qualities of Ukrainian traditional music into current-day music making actvities overall in Ukraine, not just vis-a-vis the popular music realm, that is, but throughout the whole spectrum of music making activities, will again, make up the primary focus of this exploration of the Ukrainian music making world, I have consequently come up with what I would consider a sort of typology to help further understand this whole complex development.

I will detail all this much more in the next section, dealing with “the Tradition”, but as this typology essentially represents one more important perspective by which I am viewing the Ukrainian music making world—and in some respects, can be seen as the most important perspective, as it in fact stands as the primary method of organization in terms of which I am analyzing contemporary Ukrainian music as a whole, I should therefore at least lay out here its core units, with some brief explanatory detail added as well.

I can state quite simply that this typology is comprised of three main categories, with three sub-categories nested within the first main category, and then two further sub-groupings nested within the first sub-category that lies beneath the first main category (this whole structure is graphically laid out on the home page of this site, by the way, in much more readily comprehensible form, forming as it does the bulk of the site's “table of contents”):

This first category is “the Tradition” itself—that is, that area of music making in Ukraine dedicated to finding ways of perpetuating traditional music within the context of the present day in what is taken to be its most appropriate or proper form.

The form that would seem to most of us today to be the most “natural” manner by which to do this makes up the sub-category I term “Preservationist”, which can be succinctly defined as representing an attempt at directly transferring or carrying over into the present day as much as is possible the true, “authentic” (“avtentyka” in Ukrainian) mode of performance practice that obtains for this traditional music in its “raw” or “native state”.

This “Preservationist” approach then itself further contains two Traditions encompassed within it: The Choral Tradition and the Kobza Tradition.

The other two sub-categories dedicated to perpetuating traditional music are the “Restorationist”—which differs from the “Preservationist” only in that rather than attempting to preserve music that is under threat of dying out, this approach is trying to restore modes of music making (such as from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance) that have already in effect died out, or that at least belong to an era very much by-gone—as well as what I call the “Renovationist”.

This latter sub-category—which despite the seeming “naturalness” of the “Preservationist” approach, actually pre-dates that approach by a number of decades—also involves a dedicated attempt at engaging with, and transmitting traditional music into the contemporary scene, yet does so in accordance to a presumption that such music in its “raw” state requires some degree of “dressing up”—that is to say, some manner of reconfiguration or reconstruction, of renovation in short, necessary in order to render this music more acceptable, or at least, more accessible, interesting and/or compelling, to contemporary sensibilities.

In contrast, the final two main categories I am proposing here so as to comprehensively identify the different approaches [h] by which traditional music endeavors to carve out a place in the present day world, does so not by any attempt to perpetuate traditional music in its most proper or appropriate form—what amounts, in one way or another, to a traditionalist approach, in other words—but rather by way of methods such as I discussed at length above: that is, by interweaving aspects and qualities of Ukrainian traditional music into more contemporaneous forms, in a manner that is not so much concerned with carrying over traditional elements in their original forms, as it is with finding entirely new venues and contexts within which these traditional elements can be effectively situated, or as it might be put, can find a new life.

Although I was focused above on the most conspicuous, and perhaps most immediately impactful form this endeavor tends to take—incorporating such elements into the global popular music discourse—there is actually another way to pursue this endeavor that is very much distinct from commercial popular music, even if it at times makes use of some strands of this discourse too. This is what I am calling the Avant Gardist category. For the sake of brevity, this approach can be defined in very basic terms as one that “favor[s]...experimental or unusual ideas” [x]. Thus, an “Avant Gardist” approach in this regard would involve some sort of experimentalist treatment of, or interaction with traditional music elements.

The admittedly somewhat awkward term Mainstreamist, on the other hand, is how I refer to the endeavor to interweave traditional music elements into mainstream popular music formats, which can at least potentially involve any of the primary modes of present-day commercial popular music—i.e., Contemporary Pop, Rock, Hip Hop, Electronica, etc.

To return to my main argument, though: I certainly realize that there will be no shortage of listeners in Ukraine (and elsewhere) who will take exception to and even vociferously reject this whole line of argument I have put forward here with reference to what I call “Us Too!” music—music that makes little attempt to creatively engage with Ukrainian (or any other) traditional music, or for that matter, to do much of anything creative on any basis, and instead merely replicates in a rather obsequious manner the standard, already-established approaches to popular music making—and as a result, will also be quite disdainful if not altogether dismissive of my aesthetic judgments in toto.

It's a fair guess, too, that some people will take a strong dislike to the very idea of passing judgment on the art and craft of music-making in any capacity, or at least in concentrating so much focus and attention on such judgments, particularly on the part of someone who seems so convinced of his own assessments.

To be sure, being opinionated is in all circumstances a mixed blessing at best: Nearly everyone will at one juncture or another find cause for disagreement with the stance you are taking, and not a few will be inclined to repudiate or refuse to even consider whatever you have to say without further ado.

However, one needs to be aware all the same that a person wholly lacking in any capacity for sharply focused and well thought-through critical attention would correspondingly be unable to arrive at any standpoint in which their praise and commendation actually means much of anything—empty, unthinking flattery is at least as bereft of value as harsh and uncalled-for criticism.

Therefore, the only response I can give to those who might disagree with not only any of my specific acts of judgment, but also with the whole critical/evaluative stance I am applying here, is that it is precisely this same stance that serves as the necessary ground for any acclamation I am able to put forward. Aesthetic value is as relative as anything else, and it is only relative to that which is felt to be not particularly valuable, not really all that worthwhile, that one is able to assert what is felt to be of true worth, of truly enduring and deeply substantive value.

And this moreover serves as a nice segue into enunciating what is in fact my real core purpose here:

For my crucial, overriding objective is not in fact to be critical—this is just the means to an end—but rather to put forward and promote as best I can what I feel amounts to the most extraordinary and superlative instances of Ukrainian music-making (of which there is indeed a wondrous abundance) with the goal of bringing as much beneficent and profitable attention as can be brought to this music, and to the nation and civic community of peoples from whom this music emanates.

Given this basic objective, therefore, I can declare before anything else that I will not really be engaging in much of any criticism of the sharply scornful and sneering type. What I will mainly do instead is on the one hand to try to draw attention to and cultivate appreciation for those artists whose work does in fact seem to me the most distinguished, and on the other, with reference to those artists I am not as favorable to, to proffer whatever modicum of constructive critique I am able to concoct, for whatever it might be worth.

And as it is the case, too, that one of my secondary objectives is to competently set forth, in at least a synoptic manner, a relatively comprehensive account of the Ukrainian music-making world—and will therefore unavoidably need to acknowledge at one point or another a body of artists who, despite that the fact that I might not be all that enthusiastically inclined towards their work, nonetheless hold an important enough place in contemporary Ukrainian music that they could not really be omitted—this approach seems to me to make the most sense all the way around.

Notwithstanding, there is no getting away from the fact that this will be a decidedly opinionated exploration—indeed, I would go so far as to say strongly opinionated. In short, I have a definite point of view regarding most of what I will dealing with here, and as just noted, it's safe to say not everyone will agree with this point of view. However assured I might seem in my assessments, though, the reader should realize that I did not arrive at these assessments in any careless and hasty manner. On the contrary, such assessments for me only emerge in fully-realized form as the result of extensive, and often even intense engagement. Nearly every piece of music discussed on this site I listened to multiple times; most of them I listened to dozens of times.

I also want to state, in finally coming to the close of this long introductory essay, that while my primary concern in what follows will be with music specifically embodying Ukrainian traditions, one cannot neglect the fact that Ukraine is, and has always been a very diverse country, in both its aggregate of peoples, and in its many overlapping varieties of music culture. Indeed, in that this diversity of music cultures—Jewish, Roma, Russian, Polish, Crimean Tatar, Romanian, Greek, to name just the most prominent—have always and still do overlap, intersect, and influence one another, it is not really possible in any comprehensive account of Ukrainian music-making to fail to recognize not just the presence of these other cultures in Ukraine, but of their at times decisive impact on Ukrainian traditions too.

Thus, although I will not be able to go into anything like a full delineation of this whole complex fabric of overlapping cultures, nor of the finer details regarding how these cultures have influenced one another, I do hope to discuss enough instances drawn from a select few of these other cultures, so as to at least suggestively indicate how all the component parts that make up this overlapping totality have interacted since time immemorial. As there simply isn't any way to include everything in this complex fabric—whether in regards to this greater body of diverse cultures, nor for that matter in terms of Ukrainian traditions alone—the best one can do is to construct a manner of resonant, evocative synopsis.

Be that as it may, though, I can aver that at the heart of my whole ambition for this site is the desire to create what might be deemed an accurate encapsulation of the overall “sound-world” of Ukrainian musical life: the ramified structure of meanings instantiated in its musical culture, as it is lived in the here and now, as well as vis-a-vis what has existed in the past—i.e., its glorious traditions—albeit only in so far as these traditions are still able to make their resplendent presence felt even admidst the ever-altering flood of all-too-problematic circumstances that we find ourselves immersed in today.



Pavlo Senchyna
January 23rd, 2017
(expanded upon
August/September 2017)





FOOTNOTES

Although I loathe doing footnotes, and have therefore put off this henious task until last, I will be gradually adding these pesky, impertinent addendum one by one with the best semblance of alacrity I can muster. Since it is easier on me not to follow any particular order in proceeding forward with this onerous imposition, I am going for the moment to be using alphabetical characters, rather than sequential numbers. The latter will be substituted for the former at which point I have completed the oppressive labor at hand.


[igh] I would acknowledge that employing the nation state here as the primary organizing principle by which to consider the varieties of human musical production in the domain of traditional music is imperfect in many ways.

Perhaps most conspicuously, many traditional music cultures did not themselves take shape initially, or proceed to develop along national lines. This would seem to be particularly so in regards to the African continent, especially as national boundary lines there were most often drawn by the colonial powers of Europe, in a manner more reflective quite often of the interests and needs of these powers, rather than those of the peoples indigenous to the region. Indeed, the nation state in and of itself—primarily an invention of Early Modern Europe—stands as an entity mostly imposed by European colonial powers, rather than one that rose “organically” from the sociopolitical realities at hand.

Nevertheless, the nation-state has persisted up to now in Africa, whatever its faults. And in lieu of any other unifying organizing principle, it seems to me necessary to use the nation-state in this manner, even while explicitly acknowledging its many drawbacks.

[cdo] This would probably be the best place to explicitly identify one of the definite bias' that this site openly and unreservedly operates from: That is to say, the overall standpoint of the site is one that comes down very strongly on the side of what I would call the human basis of music making—or perhaps better, the organic or physically enacted approach to music making.

The best way to explain what I have in mind here by such distinctions would I think be with reference to the “other side of the fence”, as it were—the standpoint that it seems to me represents the opposing camp on this matter. This as it happens is quite certainly and succinctly articulated by the following excerpt from the Wikipedia bio of a Russian-born, but now German-based contemporary “DJ, songwriter and record producer” who goes by the name of Zedd (his given name being Anton Zaslavski).

“Zaslavski creates his music using the Cubase suite of music production applications, and uses plug-ins such as the Sylenth1, Nexus, SynthMaster 2.6, and Omnisphere synthesizers, and the Kontakt sampler”.

This pretty much encapsulates what it seems to me comprises the difference between what I term a “technologically enacted” mode of music making, as opposed to a “physically enacted” mode—the latter, that is to say, represents a mode of music making, general musicianship and broader musical culture that is the product of physically-enacted craft, as opposed to the “disembodied” music making capabilities that digitized, computer-based technology confers.

In other words, computer-based implements or contrivances such as “[t]he Cubase suite of music production applications ...plug-ins such as the Sylenth1, Nexus, SynthMaster 2.6, and Omnisphere synthesizers, and the Kontakt sampler” exemplify a technologically enacted mode of music making that is in many ways radically disparate from “organic” music making—music that is the “product of physically-enacted craft”, generated by way of the age-old mechanisms of (more or less) direct human application to the immense variety of instrumentation that human ingenuity has devised over the course of centuries: violins, cellos, contrabasses, clarinets, zithers, sarods, sitars, balafons, congo drums, piccolo flutes, electric guitars, etc.

And as should be clear from the inclusion of the latter instrument—the electric guitar (which as it happens is my own personal instrument of choice)—an “organic” mode of music making would definitely include within its parameters music making implements that are electronically amplified and/or processed, as long as the concrete act of musical generation—the act of generating musical sound, that is to say—is the product of physical enactment, the application of human effort to any instance of musical instrumentation.

And what lies at the heart of the distinction between these two disparate “modes of music making” is what I believe is again, the crucial matter of physically enacted craft—or more specifically, the whole world of complex and diverse musical culture that is an intrinsic part and parcel of the cultivation of physically-enacted craft.

Thus, it is precisely this “whole world of physically enacted, craft-based musical culture” that is in fact for the most part decisively absent in technologically enacted music making, replaced instead by at best, a sort of curatorial and as it were, supervisory manner of human application.

And it is moreover this complex, age-old, long-developing multivarious world which forms the whole basis and foundation of a “physically enacted, craft-based musical culture” that to my mind, summarizes better than anything else why this mode is so highly preferable to a technologically enacted musical culture.

It seems odd in some respects, incidentally, to have to even emphasize all this, given that virtually all of the greatest glories of musical expression that have been generated by human civilization up to this particular historical juncture—from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Coltrane—have in fact been physically enacted endeavors, so to speak.

Nonetheless, it does seem clear that this entire age-old, rich historical development of physically enacted musical culture is now in question, as human music making practices all across the globe are increasingly confronted with the advent of a technologically enacted musical culture that tends to regard itself as not only more desirable and worthwhile, but in some ways even as morally superior to a physically enacted one. The former seems at times to be indeed playing the role on the level of culture of an invasive species, at least in so far as the realm of commercial popular music goes.

And the whole vernacular orientation that used to predominate in commercial popular music 30 or 40 or 50 years ago has in my view been vitiated, eroded, and even threatened with extinction, in a way that I feel promises extremely deleterious effects on human music making practices as a whole.

I would acknowledge, by the way, the obvious fact that a technologically-enacted musical culture does definitely represent its own version of a “vernacular music culture”, to be sure—indeed, in some respects it can be considered even more “vernacular”, or at least, more accessible, and thus more “democratic” (and this is certainly one primary source of this culture's moral presumptuousness), than a physically enacted musical culture: One need know only how to operate the mechanical apparatus in question, after all—to know the “right buttons to push”, as it might be put—in order to make music.

The problem with this whole argument, in my view, is that such a technologically-enacted musical culture tends almost inevitably to operate in such a way, so as to effectively push to the side, if not out and out replace—which is to say, eliminate—the physically enacted musical culture out of which it arose as a parasitic by-product. And again, what would be eliminated in the process—simply "swept off the table”, as it were, obliterated wholesale—is an infinitesimally complex and rich craft-based culture that connects us back untold millenia to the very pre-historical origins of human civilization itself.

One should on the other hand at least consider, I suppose, that these “two cultures” could conceivably co-exist to some extent. Yet, although I would admit that this is possibly so, I believe all the same that they can only do so with one “culture” or the other in a position of certain predominance (and this is the case, it seems to me, simply due to the dynamic just noted—that a technologically-enacted musical culture tends to proceed in such a way so as to, at the very least effectively push to the side a physically enacted musical culture).

And if it is to be the case that the clearly now-ascendent technologically-enacted musical culture will rise in the near-future into a position of indubitable and enduring predominance, while it may not obtain that the entirety of physically enacted musical culture is absolutely eliminated root-and-branch, such a physically enacted musical culture will nonetheless become increasingly more and more devalued (and a sort of across-the-board, rampant cultural devaluation seems to be the keynote of this whole historical juncture we are, to our misfortune, compelled to live through now), surviving only in a very debased, degraded, little-regarded form.

It is therefore as a remedy to such a dire outcome, then, that I call for a global revival of a physically enacted, truly human music making culture, and would furthermore posit Ukraine, with its still marvellously alive and thriving physically enacted, “vernacular” music culture—although it should be stated that technologically enacted musical culture is beginning to threaten its deleterious effects more and more here too—as one of the world headquarters for this movement.

[kbl] “Vernacular music, by my definition based on how historians use the term, is any music created by or intended for ordinary people not needing musical training to appreciate and has some connection to the culture of the creator and listener”; American Vernacular Music in the Social Studies Classroom/Eric C. Yanis, p. 5.

[dvx] “...[W]e can...make a distinction between music conceived with no reference to a mass market and music that is inseparable from the mass market in its conception. The former catgory includes classical music, folk music, and most jazz; the latter category is pop music. Pop music is created with the record industry's pursuit of a large audience in mind; other music is not...That classical or folk music can be listened to on records is accidental for its form and content; it is only pop music whose essence is that it is commmunicated by a mass medium. This is true even though some classical records sell tens of thousands of copies and most pop records are bought by nobody. Pop music is created, however successfully, for a large audience and is marketed accordingly by the record industry...The assumption is that a pop audience can be constructed by the record industry itself. The audience for classical, folk, and the other 'special' forms are, by contrast, not only relatively small...but also believed to be relatively autonomous—their tastes are 'given'. The music business can service these tastes but it can't manipulate them”; Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock'n'Roll, p. 6.

[trt] I have been influenced in this characterization of “vernacular music” as typically informed by “more horizontal-oriented social relationships” by the terminology utilized by Scott Aniol in his article “Cultivated, Commercial, and Communal”, which employs the word “Communal” to designate such traditional, or “folk” forms of music making.

[p] “Musicologists have sometimes classified music according to a trichotomic distinction such as Philip Tagg's 'axiomatic triangle consisting of “folk”, “art” and “popular musics” '...”; “Music genre”/Wikipedia. See also Tagg's “Kojak: Fifty Seconds of Television Music Towards the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music”.

As far as H. Wiley Hitchcock is concerned, what seems to me his rather befuddled, and befuddling version of this “tripartite structure” is well articulated by the following: “H. Wiley Hitchcock...chose the terms 'cultivated' and 'vernacular' [to distinguish between a 'classical' art and a 'popular' art]...
.......
[Yet Hitchcock then] distinguishes 'vernacular' from a third category of 'folk'; however, one wonders how different [these latter two categories] are in his descriptions. In itself, the term 'vernacular' connotes music that has arisen out of the natural language of the people itself, similar to what one understands as 'folk'. Yet Hitchcock is clear that while he sees 'vernacular' music as that which has 'simply grown into as one grows into one’s vernacular tongue' like folk music, it is also characterized by its 'entertainment value' rather than communal values, and its worth is dependent upon 'standards . . . of the marketplace' rather than intrinsic aesthetic qualities. There appears to be a lack of clarity with these terms, at least as how they are defined today”; “Cultivated, Commercial, and Communal”/Scott Aniol.

In short, Hitchcock's approach definitely suffers I would agree as a result of his incapacity to deal properly with the commercial, mass market factors that serve to largely determine the character of what is now generally termed “popular music”. The article by Scott Aniol just referenced is particularly useful, incidentally, as it further details a few more versions of this “tripartite structure” on the part of other music scholars, as well as itself putting forward a worthwhile version of its own. See also Peter Manuel's discussion of these matters in his book Popular Musics of the Non-Western World, pp. 2-4.

[ncb] “In his zoological research Aristotle set forth his teleological view of nature—that is, he believed organisms developed as they did because they had a natural goal (telos in Greek), or what we might call an end or a function. To explain a phenomenon, Aristotle said that one must discover its goal—to understand 'that for the sake of which' the phenomenon in question existed...”; “Aristotle's Teleology” from An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander/Thomas R. Martin.

[hnj] Even the dogs in Ukraine are getting into the act.

[b] It's definitely worth pointing out that this time span in my view roughly corresponds to not only the “Golden Age” of the “Rock tradition”—although Rock's “Golden Age” was really more 1965-85, I believe—but also what I refer to as the “R&B/Soul Tradition”. This latter tradition actually had an even longer “Golden Age” than the “Rock tradition”, it seems to me, stretching from about 1945 (quite near the moment of its inception) to thereabouts 1975.

To a fair degree, then, much of the underlying causation for what I am calling the “peak years of the Global Popular Music Revolution”, derives from this fact that these two popular music “traditions” both experienced their “Golden Age” at just about the same time, or at least significantly overlapped for a couple of decades.

This “overlapping” is by no means sheer coincidence, of course, for the two “traditions” were closely interlinked and actively drew from one another: the “Rock tradition” at first drawing a great deal of its basic foundations from the “R&B tradition”—although it did definitely expand on these foundations quite a great deal in directions not owing so much to the “R&B/Soul tradition”—and then, in the later moments of the “R&B/Soul tradition”, the “Rock tradition” to some extent repaid some portion of its debt, as it were, in serving as certain inspiration to the “R&B/Soul tradition” as the latter hit its absolute apex at the end of the 1960s, leading into the beginning years of the 1970s.

For what it's worth, see footnote #[i] below for much more regarding my thinking on all of this.

[ghj] It seems especially worth mentioning the decidecly crucial role played by the Kyiv Conservatory: The Ukrainian “Avtentyka Revival Movement” was itself more or less born there, and a great many of the most important participants in this Movement are graduates of, or have been students at this institute.

[yxt] To give a few examples of this phenomenon:

First of all, the great violinist Serhiy Okhrimchuk—who should be honored as a Ukrainian “national treasure”, in my opinion—started out in what I call “Drevo 1979”, as a founding member of Ukraine's traditional music “Avtentyka Revival Movement”, and then went on to perform such a stupendous array of musical styles in addition to Ukrainian traditional music, that it can only be referred to as dizzying: Pop Music, Prog Rock, Jazz, New Age, Standard Classical, Avant Garde Classical, Medieval and Renaissance music, Klezmer, Rebetika, Balkan, Roma...I am no doubt leaving out one or more styles in the man's toolbox, but this at least gives a decent sense of this outstanding musician's extraordinary breadth.

And a few more:

Iryna Danyleiko, perhaps the most all-around talented vocalist in Ukraine to my mind—I'm convinced there is little that she would be incapable of, stylistically speaking—who leads the Ukrainian traditional music “avtentyka ensemble” Michalove Chudo, but also performs Medieval and Renaissance music with Khoreya Kozatska, as well as Classical music settings of Taras Shevchenko's poetry, while at the same time engaging in all manner of (Slavic-inflected) popular music styles as a frequent back-up singer with Oleh Skrypka, as well as in a very standard, often Jazzy Pop music format derived mostly from the 1960s and 70s, with the rest of the talented Danyleiko clan in a project called NoveMore (performing music written by the clan's paterfamilias, Volodymyr Danyleiko), and has moreover even sung with the Ukrainian Heavy Metal outfit Nazad Shlyahu Nemae (albeit not in a particularly “Heavy Metal style”, it shoud be said).

Maria Firsova, a vocalist who was a member for a significant period of time of the important “avtentyka ensemble” Bozhychi, has also performed as a sort of Slavic Cabaret artist under the name Kuku Chanel, and has taken part moreover in a “Ska meets Early Jazz (with some Latin and other elements mixed in too)” ensemble called Sontseklosh, and moreover does a whole bunch of styles including Klezmer and Early Jazz in a group called Lemonchiki, as well as performed symphonic arrangements of jazzy pop in front of the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.

Maksym Berezhniuk, who began I believe with the “avtentyka ensemble” Kralitsya (where one or more of the female members of DakhaBrakha also got their start, if I'm not mistaken), then went on to lead two important Ukrainian Rock bands—Kamo Hrydeshi and at the present time, the Doox—and furthermore engages in a kaleidoscopic array of other stylistic modes, including Jazz and Medieval/ Renaissance music (one very very interesting project is Taráb Andalusí, an outfit that plays Medieval/Renaissance music from Spain, and that happens to also include Mykhailo Kachelov and Elena Shykura from Mashala Dosa).

Maryana Markhel, who started out as a very young person, it would seem, singing and playing violin with the seminal “avtentyka ensemble” Hurtopravtsi, then went on to play violin in the earlier years of one of Ukraine's most long-standing and best popular music groups, TaRuta (along with Yevhen and Olena Romanenko, the husband-and-wife team who still lead this band, both of whom likewise started out with Hurtopravtsi), and occasionally also sang back-up in a slew of popular music styles with the aforesaid Mr. Skrypka, and then went on from there to play Classical music in the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.

Mykhailo Kachelov (who incidentally began life as a Russian citizen), who as Ukraine's premier fiddler, has quite frequently performed Ukrainian traditional music styles—perhaps most conspicuously, with Burdon, one of Ukraine's most creative and lively traditional music outfits—as well as Medieval and Renaissance music with Khoreya Kozatska and other projects, but often enough in a great number of other styles too, including the enormous grab-bag of styles that TopOrkestra features, and who has altogether taken part in so many other stylistically diverse musical projects and endeavors in Ukraine in recent years that it might actually be quicker to list all the ones he hasn't been involved with, than all the ones that he has.

Olha Prudey, who as both a vocalist and accordionist, has performed a variety of Balkan-Greek-Turkish music with Mashala Doza, and the same manner of styles mixed in with a pronounced traditional Ukrainian music emphasis, in addition to Rock and other popular music styles, with her own band Cloud Jam, and now seems to be pursuing a more meditative-oriented sound, somewhat influenced by the musical cultures of the Indian subcontinent, combined with many of the elements from the aggregate of musical styles just mentioned, the whole of which not infrequently exhibits a rather New Age-y cast (albeit in a way that strikes me most often as more substantial in character than is often the case with this sort of approach), yet who also, as one brief video on her site would seem to give testament to, almost certainly has received training as a vocalist in Western Classical music also, an approach that she proves herself quite adept in as well.

And to include at least one artist from the Western part of the country, Lviv-based Natalka Polovynka, who led a somewhat experimental group called Maisternia Pisni that combined together innovative theatre approaches with traditional music—and in fact sung traditional Ukrainian music in that capacity with “the mother of all avtentyka ensembles” Drevo—while also giving performances of Ukrainian Greek Catholic religious music, and at the same time, putting to use her Classical music training, has been a frequent collaborator of the superlative Ukrainian Classical composer Victoria Poleva, taking the lead vocal in what at times has involved fairly edgy avant garde art music.

[i] I realize that my assertion that the global popular music realm has been in a state of steady creative decline for any number of decades now is a notion that many, if not most popular music fans at this current juncture in time—whether in Ukraine or elsewhere—will take definite, perhaps even egregious exception to.

Much of this of course comes down simply to aesthetic judgment, yet such aesthetic judgment is also inevitably married to a certain historical outlook that in the mind of every listener functions as an explanatory account that in one way or another explains why the various standard modes of musical expression are the way they are, and how they happened to arrive at this state (whether or not such an historical outlook is held close to the forefront of one's overall conception of things, or only lurks in a mostly-subconscious background, is of course another matter altogether).

The former aspect—one's aesthetic judgment—will always ultimately boil down to a matter of individual differences that can't really be reduced any further in terms of broadly general claims. In regards to the latter aspect, though—one's historical outlook—I myself can at least claim to possess a fairly thought-through historical narrative that is fairly well susceptible to assessment in more generalized terms. At the very least, I believe my standpoint along these lines is worth definite consideration. To wit:

Consider the breadth of innovations that occurred in the popular music world in the decade of the 1960s alone. At the very dawn of this decade, for instance, neither Punk, nor Heavy Metal, nor Funk—three stylistic modes that I think everyone would concur have had enormous impact in the sphere of global popular music (whether one is in favor of this impact or not) ever thereafter—were even in existence in any substantial way, except perhaps in terms of the vaguest premonitory hints.

By the end of the 1960s, however, all three styles had decisively emerged, even if the first two stylistic modes still had the greater part of its developmental arc ahead of it (the music of the late-60s James Brown Band seems to me to comprise the unquestioned “Golden Era” of Funk music, very unlikely to ever be surpassed).

To give a somewhat more thorough music historical delineation, for whatever it might be worth:

The process by which occurred a gradual interweaving of Afro-Latin rhythms coming up from the Caribbean into the Black Church Gospel-based R&B music of the African-American community—this is the development that I see as the essential stylistic foundations of Funk—was definitely underway at the beginning of the 1960s, particularly but not exclusively in the various ensembles led by James Brown, but it would be two or three years into the decade before any real coalescence along these lines would begin to take shape, and pretty much mid-decade before the style completely emerged.

Both Punk and Heavy Metal as stylistic formations, on the other hand, owe their origins in my opinion to the very little-understood “in between era” of Rock music transversing the last couple years of the 1950s and the first couple years of the 1960s, in which by way of a dynamic not unlike what sociologist's refer to as “Symbolic Interactionism”, the young fans of the mid-50s Rock & Roll craze then became music makers themselves, essentially by adopting the parent culture's negative standpoint on this music as both a mark of rebellious self-identification, as well as the basis for the construction of a harder-edge sound not really at all present in mid-50s Rock & Roll—this is what I call the “dark edge” that one can hear in so much of the Instrumental Rock that proliferated throughout this “in between era”.

Something pretty much amounting to “Proto-Punk” thus can be heard by mid-decade in the Garage Rock that then emerged out of this in-between-era's “dark edge” Instrumental Rock, and after Garage Rock got all mixed up in this decade's brief but highly significant musical nuclear fission that was Psychedelic Rock—itself a partial heir to this “dark edge” sound as well—something like “Proto-Metal” could be distinctly heard by '68 or so.

Suffice it to say, in any case, that the immensely influential development of just these three stylistic modes alone—the ramifications of which are still playing out all across the globe to this day, for good or for ill—itself gives testament I think to the enormous creative explosion that occurred in the popular music world between 1960 and 1970.

I could easily add a number of additional examples as well: The ever-more pervasive world rhythms of Ska and Reggae both pretty much emerged in this decade; what still amounts to the standard sound of Mainstream Jazz—more or less an amalgamation of the approaches of John Coltrane's early-60s group and that of Miles Davis' mid-60s group—dates to this decade, too. Salsa, still the standard sound of Latin music, to be sure draws many of its elements from developments that happened in the preceeding decades, yet the style all the same essentially came comprehensively together in the form that is now standard in the 1960s.

And what has happened since then?

Although I will have leave it to another venue to slog my way through this unavoidably depressing and dyspeptic narrative to any thorough-going degree, I do think that, in light of what in my view stands palpably as the massive creative alterations that occurred between 1960 and 1970, it is a fair request to put forward that one stop and consider how more recent decades happened to have proceeded in creative terms.

In other words, the question should be asked: What overwhelming total transformations, what penetrating creative upheavals have occurred in the global popular music realm from 2007 to 2017? Or from 1997 to 2007, for that matter? Or the whole stretch going back even 30 years or more?

There have been some, to be sure, but these few arose mostly decades ago—namely, Hip Hop and what I call Techno or Electronica—and even these, in my opinion, are either of dubious worth, or else would have to be properly judged outright corrosive in their impact. And beyond this, there is just a slew of eminently minor alterations (e.g., endlessly minute elaborations of Heavy Metal, as well as other such genres), which seem quite small even when taken together as a whole.

In short, from my perspective the current day musical realm dominated most of all by “cut-and-paste” sampling and push-button mechanistic percussion—more or less the status quo now for at least 2 decades, if not more—seems expressly parasitic, in point of fact, and not at all creative.

I think that at any rate I have put forward a decently credible argument for the case that the post-War Global Popular Music Revolution, as I call it—most of this revolution was initiated in the United States, to be sure, yet was possessed of unquestionable global ramifications—decidedly peaked during the decade of the 1960s (it's no coincidence, incidentally, that it was in this era that the developed world's broad middle classes were at its most powerful and most inclusive, too), managed to continue in relatively strong fashion for another decade and a half or so thereafter, and has slowly but surely been petering out since.

It's necessary to mention that while of course Ska and Reggae are apparent exceptions to the general pattern of U.S. gestation, and Salsa, too, although conclusively formulated in New York, also stemmed just about entirely from Carribean developments, that what was at work in regards to both of these lines was the unfurling of musical influence stemming from trans-Atlantic West African-based musical cultures, and given that this was likewise, albeit in often differing ways, the primary basic influence underwriting what was happening in the U.S., it all more or less can be seen as part of the same very broad New World developmental pattern, I think.

In fine, it is a basic, inexorable fact of human civilization itself that all cultural developments sooner or later decline. We should in my view thus simply acknowledge that the Global Popular Music world as it has stood for the last half century or so is now for the most part over and done with as a truly creative endeavor—as one writer has put it, Pop music has entered its irredeemably terminal stage: “heat death”.

In relation to the matter of the U.S.'s role in all this, it should be noted that in my opinion, British popular music throughout this period, although it did make a significant contribution to the Global Popular Music Revolution, served largely as a sort of boutique version of North American popular music—which is to say, the former was decidedly derivative of the latter, but quite often bested it at its own game, as it were.

However, there was at least one other significant contribution to the Global Popular Music Revolution that was not so derivative of or dependent on U.S. popular music. This was what might be called the “African Pop Music Revolution”, a movement extremely diverse in its output (naturally enough, considering that it gave expression to an entire continent), but that nonetheless shared much of the same body of influences and impulses.

Indeed, given the preponderant influence that musical elements stemming from this part of the world had on North American popular music—lending African music thereby a sort of unimpeachable priority in the matter—it is not at all surprising that African musicians were able to assert themselves creatively so effectively, in a manner that was able to overcome just about entirely, at least for a certain time, the gravitational pull that U.S. music effected. This was a movement, in any event, that had a long preparatory period dating back to the early decades of the 20th century, then rose to extraordinary aesthetic heights in the period encompassing the 1960s to the 1980s, and then finally began a process of slow decay in the last few decades (see footnote #ug below for more on all of this).

To be sure, though, even this decay on the part of African popular music can to some extent be pegged to the creative disarray of the popular music world in the U.S.: So dominant a role has the U.S. possessed in this realm, that is to say, so powerful the gravitational pull that its highly creative popular culture has wielded, that its creative deterioration has had a corresponding effect on the rest of the world too, bringing down—which is to say degrading—much of the foundations of the whole world's creative endeavors in the popular music realm in the process, and finally even effecting the one region on the planet that had seemed, for a time, to have overcome its influence (it's also no coincidence in my opinion, incidentally, that this deterioration in the creative value of U.S. popular culture has occurred simultaneous with, and in a manner indeed that I believe is inextricably connected to, the slow but steady hollowing out of the previously broad and inclusive middle classes, in the U.S., and in many respects throughout the developed world).

Suffice it to say, then, that in my view the way is thus very much open for some other global region—distinct from both the U.S. and Africa, yet at the same utilizing what has been achieved thus far, creatively building off of the creative attainments already put forward by both these regions—to now pick up the baton, so to speak, and push things forward once more.

And to pursue this line of thought still further: It even seems to me that perhaps the time has come for European culture (which to my mind has lost its way in the creative realm along virtually all fronts in the last four decades or so, a development which has actually had much more to do with the decline of North American culture than most people might at first presume—see footnote #nm below), to find itself once again, this time by asserting itself in the one realm that it has not really done all that much of significance up to this point.

Moreover, I think there is a decent justification for positing Eastern Europe as a potential central force in any such development, and that furthermore, Ukrainian music in particular, with its immensely powerful “vernacular music” foundations, should be able to take a very strong leadership role in this. It is just this idea that this website is most of all dedicated to.

[ug] It's worth mentioning that the absolute “gold standard” put forward thus far within the global popular music domain in regards to this task of interweaving traditional music elements into global popular music forms in an aesthetically cogent and appropriately sensitive manner, was without question established I think within the African music making world in the latter part of the 20th century. To specify very briefly just a small handful of artists of world-historical import who excelled in this regard: Sunny Ade, Youssou N'Dour, Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi

(I leave out here the one figure who might very well stand as the most accomplished African popular music artist of all, aesthetically speaking—I mean the great Fela Kuti—only in that what he undertook was in a sense something quite different, in some ways almost the inverse of what the afore-mentioned artists did. That is to say, what Fela most of all endeavored I think was not so much to “interweav[e] traditional music elements into global popular music forms”, producing what amounted thereby to a popular music version of traditional African music, but rather to take that one “global popular music form” which happened to be most sheerly African in its core essence—namely, Funk—and render it all the more so in “African terms”, as it might be put. What he put forward, therefore, was a sort of properly or fully “Africanized” version of Funk, rather than a popular music version of traditional African music).

See footnote #[i] above on my thoughts regarding what it seems to me represents a “falling off” from this “gold standard” in recent decades within this music making world (it is true enough that most of the artists I just mentioned are still active, and often still generating very fine music, yet the overall direction of the African music making world of late still seems to me to have taken a decided downturn). Notwithstanding this, though, this African “gold standard” remains all the same the first place to go in my opinion—the veritable “Mecca”, as it were—to study how this task needs to be properly carried off.

[nm] The music of the U.S. remains of course the absolute trendsetter in global popular music, as it has been for about a full century now, even though it no longer really deserves this status, I don't believe, as much as it once without any creditable or conceivable argument in fact did.

A very important argument I would wish to make here, though, in connection to this, is that from my standpoint, the overwhelming influence that the popular music—and popular culture as a whole—stemming from the United States has had and continues to have on the rest of the world has not been a good thing for American music, or for American culture in general.

Indeed, contrary to what a simplistic—and rather simpleminded, it seems to me—point of view might assert, stemming from either side of this issue, this manner of overbearing sway over virtually the whole of the developed world's popular culture, has in many way proved an out-and-out disaster for American culture itself.

Consider my argument:

For approximately a quarter century after the end of the Second World War, I would say that American culture—not confined to its commercial or “popular” culture, although it is admittedly the nature of American civilization that commercial aspects tend to pervade most everything—unquestionably predominated over the rest of the world, and did so quite deservedly too, at least as it might be viewed on the level of cultural attainment itself.

That is to say, setting aside all the complex factors that helped to contribute to this state of affairs—American economic sway first of all, of course, although even this did not result in the manner of overwhelming cultural influence that eventually ensued until the near total collapse, if not utter self-immolation, that European civilization experienced by way of the First, and even more so, Second World War—it does not seem to me at all unreasonable to assert that in the 25 years or so following the end of the Second World War, the cultural production of the U.S. overall was more innovative, dynamic, and sheerly creative than that arising anywhere else in the world.

To wit: No other nation in the world possessed up and coming figures in the plastic or visual arts of the same caliber as Pollock, de Kooning, Raushchenberg, Romare Bearden, Joan Mitchell and Andy Warhol.

Nowhere else in the world was anyone building buildings as fresh and remarkable as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater or Guggenheim Museum.

A whole new, hitherto unimaginable sector of world music culture was being born as (primarily) African American Jazz musicians were in the process of transforming their popular art into a rigorously demanding, yet extraordinarily ebullient art music, culminating in such momentous world figures as Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

And in the realm of popular music itself, there rose up at the same time marvelous new modes of musical expression that mixed together African American and European American vernacular forms—forms that had been developing, and indeed commingling throughout the New World for decades if not centuries by that point, and now issued forth in an explosion of groundbreaking original styles and approaches that have reshaped and reconstituted the whole of the world's musical culture down to its very roots.

Yet, the crucial point that I would make here in addition is that nearly all of of these Post-War Americans artists were working in such a way that the example of European cultural attainments loomed forever before them, as it might be put. In other words, European culture of the preceding centuries stood still as the apex of cultural achievement, and functioned thereby as a sort of perpetual challenge to American artists, drawing out, provoking, instigating competing cultural production, more or less along the lines of the “agonistic” manner of cultural generation as formulated by Harold Bloom (I realize that there is much more to Bloom's “theory of influence” than this, but what I have in mind here has to do more with a broader conception of a general “agonistic” dynamic that tends to underlie cultural production, such as informs Bloom's theory).

This was the case, I believe, even for African American Jazz musicians—or perhaps, most of all for African American Jazz musicians. For, to properly understand what was achieved in this line of endeavor, I think you have to grasp the deep exigency that African American artists felt in confrontation with Euro-American, and by extrapolation, European artistic production.

What was felt to be urgently needed, that is to say, was a “High Art” mode of musical expression generated by African Americans that could be seen as justifiably competing with, as legitimately on the same level as European-based cultural attainments (see the great Jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery's comments regarding John Coltrane's art in relation to all this).

And what was begot from this felt need was an astonishingly innovative art form that essentially took European-derived and/or Euro-American forms of musical approach, and wove into them what might be called an “African aesthetic”, and did so in a very abstract and extraordinarily sophisticated manner to boot.

Yet with what I would consider the wholesale collapse, if not capitulation of European culture in recent decades, what seems to me in fact as a rather obsequious acceptance, and even more obseqiuously, self-adoption on the part of the majority of Europeans of American cultural forms as the only real viable modes of expression—an attitude that has allowed American culture to dominate European, and indeed, the global cultural realm to a well-nigh overbearing degree—has removed this challenging or inciting agonistic dynamic from the scene just about entirely.

And what I think this has prompted most of all on the part of American artists and cultural producers in general has been a rather overweening, thoughtlessly presumptuous, idiotically overconfident, and thoroughly slothful mindset, leading to a quite repulsive state of affairs that, on the home front can be most generously characterized as corrosive vapidity, and on the world's stage, is perhaps summed up best by the following two phrases, both of them borrowed from the sociologist George Ritzer (an American, incidentally): “cultural McDonaldization”, and even more trenchantly, “the globalization of nothing”.

To be sure, what I have referred to as the “self-immolation” of European civilization vis-a-vis not one, but two World Wars was, one would have to imagine, the predominant precipitative factor in this implosion of European culture. Yet this “implosion” did not occur all at once; rather, in the immediate Post-War period in which American culture—now given new opportunities as a result of the predominance of both its economy, as well as its new-found geopolitical status—rose to its own great heights, not only were the achievements of the European past still quite distinctly palpable in the collective mindset of the world, so to speak, but European achievements in the contemporary arts still bore much influence and clout.

For example: Although Japanese cinema was also very fine in this same period, hardly anywhere else in the world was film culture as impressive in the quarter century or so after the Second World War than in Europe. What was happening in Italian and French cinema in particular (and one would have to add Scandinavia too, due to presence of Ingmar Bergman alone) was quite wondrous.

American filmmaking—again, very much inspired by what was happening in Europe—did not even begin to catch up (excepting here a small handful of figures such as Welles, Hitchcock, Ford, at their very best) in any appreciable way until the early 1970s, and this excellent development was then almost immediately engulfed, if not altogether eliminated, by the execrable advent of the “blockbuster phenomenon” that emerged in the second half of the 1970s, and has reigned over world film culture ever since. It is no coincidence to my mind, in short, that this repellent phenomenon took place at the very moment that European cinema, and I think European culture as a whole, quietly crawled into a corner, as it were, and if not quite out and out died altogether, managed thereafter to maintain itself only in a very weak and feeble condition, at best.

I acknowledge for what it's worth that the matters I am concerned with here are profoundly complex, and I have no doubt just put forward a rather peremptory summary (just like a typical American, one might add) of the convoluted and entangled world historical issues at hand.

Yet the cultural status quo we are now immersed in is for me irredeemably repulsive all the same, and for that I blame at least in part the Europeans, even though I realize that from the standpoint of many Europeans, this is quite like piling insult on to injury: First Americans imperiously impose their culture on the rest of the world, then they proceed to exhibit the unmitigated gall of blaming the rest of the world for the egregious consequences of this dire state of affairs.

Be that as it may, the core point of my whole argument is that, culturally speaking, Europe needs to find itself once more. It should do so, in my opinion, not by wholly rejecting American influence—which like it or not has in many ways stood as its primary cultural influence these past few decades—but by fully absorbing this influence, which is to say, fully take responsibility for what this influence amounts to, and then move on from there to begin generating something else, something further along, something new to the world stage that didn't exist previously.

The world as a whole in point of fact needs Europe to do this, I believe—America perhaps most of all.

In connection to all this, it might be useful to bring to mind what seems to me the undeniable fact: That the most penetrating and perspicacious way in which to understand the current, grotesquely inappropriate occupant of the Executive Office in the U.S. is that he is, indeed, very much a sort of condensation and culmination of a great many of the unfortunate paths which American culture has proceeded down in recent decades (one should not attempt to grasp such matters as if they lined up primarily in terms of “Left” and “Right”, politically speaking. Cultural matters such as I am concerned with here are indeed, exponentially more complex than this simplistic and reductive way of seeing things could possibly allow for, particularly in that the forces at hand readily permeate both sides of this equation, even if at times in different ways).

Culture, one should never forget, is not a trifling, not even pop culture, despite what some seem to believe—or really, most especially not pop culture, given its mass dissemination and the enormity of its influence—for it is precisely in the cultural sphere that we collectively work out an operational sense of what is both possible and desirable.

And thus, it is my view that only when Europe finds itself, culturally speaking, once more, can America properly do the same, and thereby revive and raise up its own culture from the abysmal depths into which it has lately sank.

[x] This is actually the (entirely adequate) definition that the Google search engine renders up.

[h] A very important point to add here is that in no way do I mean to favor any one of these three main approches—or five approaches altogether, if one counts the three sub-categories subsumed within “the Tradition” as categories in their own right—over the others. Indeed, the primary point I am concerned to make in this regard is that each of these five approaches are necessary to maintain the health and ongoing thriving state of Ukrainian music.

It is true enough that “the Tradition”, with its three sub-categories, does possess a certain centrality, of course. Yet, if “the Tradition”, or for that matter, any of the other categories, were to stand alone, bereft of all the others, the Ukrainian music making world would be left in a very impoverished state. Rather than seeing any of these categories in terms of some manner of competition for total hegemonic predominance, so to speak, the better way to comprehend things is to assume as a given that all five approaches find themselves at their strongest when they stand in relation to one another in such a way so as to be open to taking influence and learning by example from the other approaches, to one degree or another.