Folk music

Expeditions to the Carpathian highlands, to Polissia villages, to Bessarabian hamlets capture singing the way it was sung — without a stage and without an editor. This is the material that everything else grows from: academic settings, the avant-garde, ethno-electronic.

The bandura, the kobza, the lira — three instruments that made our history portable. Dumas about Cossack campaigns, laments for the fallen, psalms of blind singers. After the 1930s terror the tradition holds on through a handful of names and finds its way back into the light.

The Kyiv chant, the znamenny chant, the spiritual concertos of Berezovsky and Vedel. A parallel line is folk-sacred music: carols, schedrivkas, laments — singing that does not distinguish between the temple and the field.