Placing Ukraine

Western, World, Global?

One of the outcomes of Russia’s full-scale invasion has been that many more people know of Ukraine, can locate it on a map, and understand that it is an independent country that is not Russia. These developments, while they’ve come at far too high a price, are a testament to how Ukraine has effectively seized on a moment of crisis to change stale and misinformed perceptions that were still common amongst well-educated adults just three years ago. (I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked if I speak Russian as part of conversations about my research in Ukraine—for what it’s worth my knowledge of Russian is passive and utilitarian, and my desire to improve this skill set evaporated on February 24, 2022.)

Within the discipline of musicology, however, the placement of Ukraine is still mired in confusion. 

I recently came across an advertisement for a position that sought a musicologist or ethnomusicologist with expertise in “global music.” I have spent a great deal of time wondering if my work on Ukraine would fall under this rubric. Ukraine is, of course, part of the globe, but that is clearly not what the term is intended to mean. More specific to the current context, Ukraine is a country whose musical culture has been, to date, almost entirely left out of the musicological discourse—a characteristic that is often implied when words like “global” are used in musicology.

I also have good reason to think that others in my field see Ukraine in this way; in November I will be speaking at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society and, although I will be presenting my research on Ukraine’s engagement with Schoenberg, one of Western music’s most important figures, I will do so as part of a panel entitled “Global Music Theory: Perspectives on Tonality and Phrasing.”

I find this view of Ukraine as part of a scholarly movement towards a more global and inclusive discipline in many ways positive, but I am not without reservations. This is most pronounced in conversations around concert or “art music” repertoires. Despite my research’s regular engagement with ethnomusicological scholarship, the Ukrainian music I study is by all definitions western art music: it is composed using western notation, within frameworks of western tonality, for performance on western instruments according to performance practices enshrined during the Romantic era of western composition. It is in dialogue with other western traditions and its composers name their influences among the canon of western art music. For some, however, the term “global music” was created for the explicit purpose of distinguishing all those musics that are not western art music. And consequently, western art music cannot be considered global. Where, then, do we place the tradition of notated concert music from Ukraine? 

Related is a widespread perception of Ukraine as another white, European country that is largely interchangeable with other Slavic cultures. This assumption is derived from imperial narratives about the region. At a moment when musicology in North America is undertaking admirable and long-overdue efforts to incorporate musical contributions from groups that have long been marginalized by western hegemony, this has further marginalized Ukrainian music.. 

Yet one of the things that makes Ukraine so special—and has drawn me to this part of the world—is its position as a place where diverse currents meet. It has perhaps uniquely been divided across three different major empires: Austrian, Russian and Ottoman. It has been home to significant populations of diverse ethnic groups including Slavs, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Tatars, Roma, and Koreans. (I highly recommend Ukraїner’s series on the country’s diverse communities for more information.) Many of these communities have been a part of Ukraine for centuries.

The view of Ukraine as a white monolith is ironically the work of the empires that have most recently ruled over the region. These empires, by the way, do not see the richness in their diverse ethnic makeup and intentionally send their non-white subjects off to die in their colonial wars.

At a time when academia is increasingly interested in the discourses of post-colonial theory, Ukraine’s history as a formerly colonized space makes it a rich example for study. Those familiar with Ukraine have much to offer to these discourses, a fact to which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s keynote speech at this year’s Lviv Media Forum conference testifies. Both the Forum’s invitation and, more importantly, Spivak’s acceptance—a decision that meant no less than 24 hours of travel to a war zone (Spivak is 82 years old)—are indicative of the importance of post-colonial discussions to Ukraine, and vice versa.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaking at the Lviv Media Forum conference in one Lviv’s bomb shelters

Not only is Ukraine’s unique history and makeup often eclipsed by imperial thinking, but well-intentioned responses to Russia’s full-scale invasion have often reified the tropes of colonialism in the region. One example is the readiness of the western platforms, from news outlets to intellectual institutions, to go to Russianists for information about Ukraine. Scholars and pundits long occupied with Russian culture, history, and politics pivoted nearly over night to covering Ukraine without any acknowledgment that Ukraine occupies a space beyond their expertise. This phenomenon simply reinforces the imperialist view of Ukraine as merely a “little” part of Russia. Perhaps even more problematic is a blindness to the likelihood that whatever a specialist in Russian culture or history may have learned about Ukraine through their previous work, especially information gleaned from Russian sources, will be almost without exception warped by Russia’s imperial and revisionist narratives. I have become very attached to a phrase I started hearing in 2022: you can’t see Kyiv from Moscow.

The challenge of placing Ukraine on the map of musicology goes back to a lack of knowledge about its culture and therefore about what its study can offer the discipline. The categories that we have created to rectify the historical disregard of and devaluation of diverse musics in the world remains dependent upon definitions that are constructed from hegemonic rubrics of culture. In the first instance Ukraine has been considered unimportant because it is just an inferior part of Russia’s national culture, a result of letting Russia define Ukraine. In the second instance, by being considered merely part of the “great Russian culture,” Ukraine does not qualify for the attention we are now giving to global music.

The antidote to this historical formulation, which has excluded Ukraine from the discourse, has the potential to be deeply instructive if we accept Ukraine’s existence beyond current ways of framing culture and the world: On the one hand, it is an ethnically, linguistically, and confessionally diverse country with a long history of struggle under colonial oppressors who have erased or appropriated its cultural contributions. On the other, it is a country with a rich output of art, or academic, music that exists in dialogue with elite western musical traditions—traditions that are nearly always associated with centers of power.

The task for musicologists is to ask ourselves to what ends do we wish to make changes to the discipline. I, for one, seek an inclusivity that values repertoires and the communities of their creation not by a definition of what they are not, but by looking—and listening—closely to local histories everywhere that have been erased or absorbed by imperial narratives.

As someone who has taught at a public college for the past five years, working with students who must be prepared for careers in music today, at a time when the canonical repertoire is still depended upon to fill concert halls, I believe this dialogic and critical approach allows us to both responsibly cover (without lionizing) undeniably consequential works of the canon, while fulfilling the imperative to explore and expand our knowledge of global musics.

---