Peripheral Solidarities: Ukrainian Musical Modernism Beyond Ukraine

While the repertoire of Ukrainian musical modernism within Ukraine still requires much attention, a discussion of this repertoire must also include Ukrainian modernism’s influences beyond Ukraine. Ukrainian composers had a profound, if still unacknowledged, impact on American modernism, particularly early electronic composition, post-tonal experimentalism, Free Jazz and post-bop, as well as the quintessential sounds of Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. Ukrainian composers were also among some of the first to write serious compositions informed by the music of several Central Asian republics, including Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Framing these engagements as part of Ukrainian modernism’s inclination towards the twin poles of innovation and tradition, this talk will explore how these composers and their music demonstrated a solidarity between Ukrainians and others on the peripheries of geographical and musical empires.

Image credit: Joseph Schillinger, Green Squares (from series, the Mathematical Basis of the Arts), ca. 1934

Find out more about Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia Seminar Series.

Speaker

Dr Leah Batstone is an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Music History at Montclair State University. Her research focuses on the intersections of music and sociopolitical change in Central and Eastern Europe. Her first book, Mahler’s Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2023. Her current projects include a monograph on Ukrainian musical modernism and a handbook to Stefania Turkevych’s Symphony No. 1 (1937) for Cambridge University Press, as well as the volume Music in Ukraine: An Introduction to Nation, Identity, and Sound, which she is co-editing with Peter Schmelz for Indiana University Press. She is also the creative director of the annual Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in New York City, which she founded in 2020.