Though this documentary film is concerned with telling the story of the “authentic” music movement in Ukraine—tracing the origins of this story to a collaborative relationship first established way back in 1958, between a Kyiv Conservatory professor of musicology and the music making inhabitants of a tiny village in central Ukraine called Kryachkivka (cryatch-KEEV-ka)—its broader focus is on not only the thriving “authentic” music movement that arose directly out of this collaborative relationship, but also on the myriad ways in which the foundations set down by this movement blossomed out then into something even more rich and strange:

For what burst forth from this “authentic” matrix was indeed a wild flowering of diverse expression, crossing over many stylistic boundaries, yet all alike grounded on traditional music roots.

Much of the impetus behind this project, in fact, stems from my observation in researching and studying the Ukrainian music world over the course of a number of years now that a great many of the most talented, most interesting and most creatively dynamic musical artists in Ukraine—operating in extraordinarily wide-ranging stylistic modalities such as Rock and other Mainstream Popular music, experimental Art music, Jazz-inflected and theatrical-oriented musics, even Sacred and Classical music—tend to have a very close relationship with the traditional music world.

Quite often, this relationship involves having spent time in one or more of the avtentyka ensembles that have sprung up in great abundance in the post-Soviet era—a remarkable development in many respects, which altogether can be referred to as the Avtentyka Revival Movement (“avtentyka” = “authentic” in Ukrainian).

A closely related phenomenon to the avtentyka ensembles, and serving in a very concrete sense as the core basis of the Avtentyka Revival Movement, is the practice of “field research”—what essentially amounts to “song collecting”, undertaken in the multitude of rural villages that make up the Ukrainian countryside—which a great many of these musical artists have engaged in, usually beginning as students in one of Ukraine's ethnomusicology departments, but often continuing on in the practice in subsequent years.

However, the manner of “field research” that grew out of the model initiated by Volodymyr Matviyenko—the Kyiv Conservatory professor of musicology mentioned above —in conjunction with the music makers of Kryachkivka, was not merely an academic endeavor designed to abstractly analyze such village music makers, but one in which the urban “academic researchers” interactively engage with their rural “research subjects”, to the point that they actually join in with, and become an abiding part of their music making.

Hence, a true collaborative relationship is established between these two contingents, in which the “academic researchers” situate themselves “horizontally” on the “ground level” of this village community, as it were, so as to participate in the music making practices of their “subjects”, and do so in a way, moreover, that accepts the practice customs of this rural music culture as the proper, authoritative standard to follow.

In short, those who were “academic researchers” now become transformed into students, and the “research subjects” themselves transform into educators, into guides, into gurus. Rather than merely “subjects” of a research endeavor, these living exemplars of an ancient art form are now recognized as the hallowed preceptors of its ways and means—as the rustic Magi of the precious tradition.

In the process, a small handful of these rural music makers have managed to devise a new role for themselves as performers on a national, and at times even international stage, a role quite distinct from that which they embodied when simply practicing their ancient art in the age-old, informal manner—an art wholly integrated into their own lives as agricultural laborers, and into the life of the village communities into which they were born and raised.

And in turn, the “academic researchers” have taken on a new functionality as well, in a sense even more far-reaching, essentially metamorphosing themselves vis-a-vis the nature of their role: Likewise becoming active performers, yet now asserting themselves as not merely the investigators, or even the acolytes of a particular tradition of music making, but as this tradition's true inheritors—as precisely that group of people who have taken upon themselves the task of carrying on this tradition, and to do so in a manner that will ensure its preservation, that it will continue in a substantial, viable, and bona fide manner into future generations.

In this way then, emanating out from this underlying “structural model” of “collaborative field research”, set down by the Avtentyka Revival Movement in its nascent moments, have come both the avtentyka ensembles themselves, as well as a whole plethora of riveting stylistic explorations extrapolated from this underlying “collaborative model”.

It might be be said, then, that these two closely interrelated phenomena of “collaborative field research” and the avtentyka ensembles have together served as something like “training schools” for much of the best music that Ukraine has put forth in recent years. And I would go further to assert that what is at hand here amounts to not only some of the most extraordinary music making to come out of Ukraine in the past decade or so, but out of Eastern Europe, and out of the European continent as a whole.



Pavlo Senchyna