Film Outline

Thematic Introduction




TAGLINE:

“The human soul of music making is not yet dead. It lives still...in Ukraine...in Kryachkivka.”


LOGLINE:

This is the story of the ways and means by which ancient Ukrainian music traditions have not only survived under the most difficult of circumstances, but have managed to flourish even, branching-out in the process into a wild flowering of diverse stylistic forms both rich and strange.


SYNOPSIS:

This is the story of an “authentic” traditional music movement in Ukraine that was planted within the frigid depths of the Cold War, sown under harsh conditions of cultural deprivation and suppression, but that mangaged to ultimately persevere so as to blossom out in wondrous abundance in the post-Soviet era. In so doing, this movement has served as the inspiration of some of the most extraordinary music making to come not only out of Ukraine in recent years, but out of Eastern Europe, and out of the European continent as a whole.

It is a story that begins in a tiny rural village in central Ukraine called Kryachkivka [cryatch-KEEV-ka]. It was here in 1958 that a music scholar, a professor at the Kyiv Conservatory named Volodymyr Matviyenko, happened to discover a circle of friends who without any outside encouragement or support, were endeavoring to preserve the distinctive Ukrainian vocal traditions that had been rooted in the region since time immemorial.

And it was by way of the ongoing structure of collaboration established between these native inhabitants of Kryachkivka, and the cadre of urban academics who followed Prof. Matviyenko in making a “pilgrimage” out to the tiny rural village, that a full-blown “authentic” traditional music movement began to slowly take shape in Ukraine.

Indeed, the first offshoot of these collaborative interactions was the musical collective Drevo—meaning “tree” in Ukrainian—a sort of umbrella organization encompassing both a rural and urban contingent, made up of Kryachkivka's native music makers on the one hand, and the academic acolytes of Prof. Matviyenko on the other.

Yet, the musical foundations thereby set down in Kryachkivka would continue to blossom out even further: Drevo in fact went on to serve as both the primary model for the whole rife flowering of “authentic” music ensembles that would ensue in Ukraine, as well as the initiating catalyst for a wide-ranging dissemination—a veritable “branching-out”—of this heart core basis of “authentic” Ukrainian traditional music into a remarkably diverse array of stylistic modes and approaches: Rock, World Beat and other mainstream popular music; Jazz-inflected and avant-garde experimental musics; Art Theatre-oriented, and even Sacred and Classical music.


Pavlo Senchyna