About the 2021 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival
The 2021 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival brings the new music of Ukraine to the United States’ most exciting musical center, contextualizing this important repertoire through discussion with scholars, performers, and composers. UCMF attracts those interested in new music, the intersections of music and contemporary events, and the culture of Ukraine.
Click here to get tickets and attend.
MUSIC FESTIVAL SCHEDULE:
Voices from the New Millennium
Friday, March 5, 2021, 7:00 PM (EST) | Streaming from Ukrainian Museum of New York
Alisa Kobzar, S
Adrian Mocanu, Jeux for viola and piano
Lena Sierova, Suppression
Boris Loginov, The Two
Victoria Poleva, Music for Temo
—INTERMISSION—
Maxim Kolomiiets, Icy Echo of Your Silence
Victoria Poleva, Songs of Innocence
Yana Shliabanska, Almost Real Directions
Oleh Bezoborodko, ..To love, not to love...
Our opening concert will feature a series of composers from Ukraine’s youngest generation. These young artists show a diversity of approaches to contemporary music in Ukraine today from noise music and extended techniques (Kobzar, Loginov) to cartographic compositional techniques (Shliabanska) to a series of post-modern approaches (Sierova, Mocanu, Kolomiiets). The work of these young composers is complemented by works by two of Ukraine’s most well-known living composers, Victoria Poleva and Oleh Bezborodko, whose works employ various avant-garde and post-minimalist techniques.
Performed by Yuliya Basis, Caroline Drexler, Helen Newby, Adrianne Munden-Dixon, Carrie Frey, Rita Rovenskaya, Andy Didorenko, Lindsey Eckenroth, Jennifer Gliere, Gleb Kanasevich, Tristan Kasten-Krause, Joanna Mieleszko, Rita Mitsel, Mivos Quartet, Heather O’Donovan, Valeriya Sholokhova, Gerson de la Rosa, and Lucie Vitkova. Click here for more info.
The Kyiv Avant-Garde
Saturday, March 6, 2021, 7:30 PM (EST) | Streaming from Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center
Vitaly Godziatsky, Surface Ruptures (1963),
Volodymyr Zahortsev, String Quartet No.1 (1967)
Volodymyr Huba, Confession (1967)
Leonid Hrabovsky, Concerto Misterioso (1977)
—INTERMISSION—
Valentyn Sylvestrov, Drama (1971) for piano, violin, and cello
This evening presents five works by leading composers of Kyiv avant-garde group. In the 1960s, they created music that challenged socialist realism – the only acceptable musical and aesthetic style in the USSR. They maintained contacts with composers in Europe and the US and smuggled books about 12-tone music and scores of the Second Viennese School and Polish modernists, in order to diligently study them and “catch-up with the West.” The result, however, was not a replication of Western European post-war avant-garde, but highly original music, which was valued by the audiences on the other side of the Iron Curtain and scorned by the Soviet ideologues in their native Ukraine.
Performed by Anna Shelest, Mivos Quartet, Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra, and Talea Ensemble. Click here for more info.
Electroacoustic Voices
Sunday, March 7, 2021, 2:30 PM (EST) | Streamed from Flagler Cary Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music
Katia Olenych, Kolomyiky
Alla Zahaykevych, Voice/Way
Ujif_Notfound, Practice of Strings
Alex Chorny, As the dusk becomes silence for Bass-Clarinet and Electronics
Svyatoslav Krutykov, Chronometry for Cello and Electronics
Anna Arkushyna, Modelle for Violin and Tape
Ostap Manulyak, Lithos
Alla Zahaykevych, Punctum Reditum for Clarinet, Violin, Accordion and Electronics
This concert will present works by composers of all generations of Ukrainian electroacoustic music, including the "nouveau-concrete" music of Svyatoslav Krutykov, "pioneer" of electronic music of the 1960s, pieces by composers from the 1990s and 2000s (Alla Zahaykevych, Ujif_Notfound and Ostap Manulyak) and music by members of the youngest generation who grew up in an independent Ukraine (Anna Arkushyna, Alex Chorny). A wide genre palette of works, including electronic music, works for instruments and electronics, and media art, will allow the listener to feel the individual progress and originality of the modern Ukrainian electroacoustic scene.
Performed by Alla Zahaykevych, Madison Greenstone, Lavinia Pavlish, Valeriya Sholokhova, and Lucie Vitkova, with sound engineering by Gleb Kanasevich. Click here for more information. Click here for more information.
Join us for a special panel Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 12PM EST via ZOOM webinar
Curating the Music Festival: Approaches to New Repertories
Click here to register for this conversation.
Questions of how to engage audiences with previously unknown works are more pertinent than ever. The move to diversify concert hall repertoire can be seen in changes to musical programming throughout the United States.
Join us for a discussion about curating music programming and learn how Liubov Morozov from Ukraine and Christopher Gibbs from the US explore the challenges and rewards of bringing new repertoires and new audiences together.
Our Panelists
LIUBOV MOROZOVA is a musicologist and music critic. She has been the Artistic director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra since 2018. As a music curator, she has worked on numerous projects including the cultural forums "Doncult" (Kyiv, 2014; Lviv, 2015) and "GaliciaCult" (Kharkiv, 2016), "New Ukrainian Soundscapes" at the 3rd and 4th ODESSA CLASSICS festival(2017, 2018), the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s "Digital Concert Hall in Ukraine" (since 2017), a joint program with ProMuseum (France) and the Goethe-Institut called "Cult or Culture: The Development of Participatory Practices in the Museum" (Kharkiv, Zaporizhye, 2016), and the music program of the Book Arsenal (Kyiv, 2019, 2021). She developed and conducted a series of concerts of contemporary music called "On the border of the fertile land: Stalkers and combiners of new music" at the Kharkiv Philharmonic (season 2017-2018). She is the curator, host and consultant for the music department of the Bouquet Kyiv Stage festival (Kyiv, 2018-2020).
Morozova has also developed a number of courses, including "Dumbbells for the ears" for the Cultural Project (Kyiv, 2016), as well as a course on the musical avant-garde of the 1920-30s called "Twelve nails in the coffin of Ukrainian romanticism" at the M17 gallery (Kyiv, 2019).
As a public musicologist, she is the co-host of the program #MuzLove / "Lectures. Music” on the UA: Culture TV channel with documentary screenwriter Yuri Makarov. She previously hosted the radio program "F-sharp" on Hromadske Radio (2018-2019). She is a member of the Committee on the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine and was a member of the jury of the National Selection for Junior Eurovision 2020. She has been working in journalism since 2005 and has authored more than 900 articles in domestic and foreign periodicals.
CHRISTOPHER H. GIBBS is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, and Executive Editor of The Musical Quarterly. He has also taught at Columbia University, Haverford College, and the University at Buffalo.
Gibbs edited The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and is the author of The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which has been translated into five languages. He is co-editor, with Dana Gooley, of Franz Liszt and His World (Princeton University Press, 2006) and, with Morten Solvik, of Franz Schubert and His World (Princeton University Press, 2014). He co-authored, with Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (Oxford University Press, 2013; revised 2018).
Gibbs is a recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1999-2000. He has written for many scholarly and general interest publications, including 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, The Opera Quarterly, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed to anthologies and reference works, including the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
As a program annotator and lecturer, Gibbs works with leading musical institutions around the world. He was the musicological director for the final three years of the acclaimed Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and served as musicological adviser for the bicentennial Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall. For the past twenty seasons he has written the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra. He gives frequent pre-concert lectures for that orchestra, as well as for Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York City Opera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Great Performers” at Lincoln Center, Music@Menlo, and other organizations.
Click here for the official 2021 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival website and more information, including performers, composers, video recordings, photos and more.
