About this conversation
Ahead of its fifth season, the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, the Center for the Humanities and the Barry S. Brook Center of Music Research and Documentation will present a roundtable conversation of music and migration. The movement of composers and their musics across borders is not only a recurring and salient topic for Ukrainian composers (perhaps now more than ever), but it is also an important subject across numerous schools of composition and diaspora groups. Join musicologists Tina Frühauf and Leah Batstone and composers Mykhailo Chedryk and Olga Zaitseva-Herz for an exploration of how geographical movement impacts and enriches intellectual and musical exchange.
Free and open to the public. Click here to Register and attend.
PARTICIPANTS:
Tina Frühauf is the Director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and Executive Director of its largest project, the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions and books are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards; and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023). An active scholar and writer, Dr. Frühauf’s current research focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the 20th century and the conditions of globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience as well as musicology and coloniality.
Leah Batstone is a historical musicologist and the founder and creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival. Formerly an instructor at Hunter College, CUNY, she is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna, as part of the REWIRE program, a Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions project COFUND supported by the European Commission. Her current book project, Tradition and Revolution: Musical Modernism in Ukraine, will be the first book-length study of Ukrainian musical modernism in any language. Her first monograph, Mahler’s Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies, was published in 2023 by Boydell & Brewer.
Mykhailo Chedryk (b. Svalyava, Ukraine, 1997) studied music theory at Uzhhorod Music College and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music history at the National Music Academy of Ukraine under Anna Hadetska. Mykhailo has served as project coordinator for Kyiv Contemporary Music Days since 2017, and as a music program manager at the Ukrainian Institute from 2019 to 2023. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including two scholarships from the President of Ukraine and the Second Prize of the First Euristrings Guitar Composition Competition. His compositions have been featured at events such as the 25th International Festival of Contemporary Music "Contrasts" in Lviv, the "Kawasaki Jazz Festival" in Tokyo, and "Up To Three" in Berlin, and have been performed by ensemble mosaik, Ensemble Nostri Temporis, Khreshchatyk choir, bassist Nazarii Stets, and others.
Originally from Dnipro, Olga Zaitseva-Herz is a multi-genre performer, composer, and scholar who conveys her academic research findings through an overarching approach that blends ethnographic field recordings of folk songs with contemporary musical performances, showcasing the song archives in Ukraine and in North American diasporas on a global scale. Olga studied violin performance at Dnipro Academy of Music, sound design studies at the Kyiv Karpenko-Karyi University of Theater, Cinema and TV, and classical singing and vocal pedagogy at the Wiesbaden Music Academy/ Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. In 2022, she received the Ottilie Roederstein Emerging Artist Award from the Hesse Ministry of Science and Art in Germany. She completed her doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta in 2023.
This discussion is part of the 2024 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, and is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Barry S. Brook Center of Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center.
