Volume 37
Fall-Winter
2011 |
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Murmur, murmur, murmur in the forest,
The fog is covering the fields,
The fog is covering the fields, the fields.
A mother is sending her son away:
Go, my son, go away from me.
At the age of seventeen I was transplanted
from my birthplace of Kyiv, Ukraine, to
New York. A dreamy European city in
front of my eyes was replaced by New
York, with all its severity of lines and colors,
unforgiving yet intriguing. I’ve painted since
my childhood, learning visual precision and
honesty, developing a firm faith in harmony,
beauty, and perfection. My new reality was
rough and fearsome. And I knew that I was
being transformed. My new reality brought
new simplicity and roughness into my work.
I painted nudes, craving love, music, and
spiritual fulfillment. All of these eventually
came, bearing happiness for the émigré/
exile/refugee, transforming him into an
American:
Come back, my son, come back to
me, my boy,
So I would wash your head.
Mother, my head could be washed
by rains,
And my hair shall be combed by feral
winds.
There has always been music in my
family. My father is an artist-painter, but
he was also a fine classical baritone in his
younger days. Our house was always full of
interesting guests, of all kinds of arts. The
grown-ups were infinitely more interesting
than children of my own age. The former
were bearers of the historical weight of the place where I was growing up. Their
sense of history intoxicated me, inexorably,
forever, even though I was unaware of it
at the time. It manifested itself much later
in my music.
I naturally studied painting from an early
age, and it would always remain my main
calling. Inexplicably, I remained indifferent
to music, despite being surrounded by
it, until the age of fourteen, when I had
an epiphany upon hearing “Trauermusik
Beim Tode Siegfrieds” in Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung. It opened the floodgate of
music. I went on to study painting and music
after coming to New York. I studied lute
with Patrick O’Brien, who also taught me
the basics of harmony and counterpoint.
I began composing for myself during
the 1990s, concentrating on the baroque
idiom and my chosen instrument, the
baroque lute. This instrument doesn’t
tolerate gratuitous dissonance, and my
compositions naturally took on the style
and character of the baroque era.
Descartes once said that when he was
a seminarian, he was told by one of his
professors that if one gets a really good
idea, it must be immediately ascribed to a
long dead authority. Mythopoeia ran in my
family, so I decided on a whim to invent
a mysterious and previously unknown
historical figure to which I would ascribe
my compositions as genuine baroque
music, and miraculously, they were taken
as such. In the mid-1990s, I wrote out
some pieces in a nice baroque hand,
signed them “Sautscheck,” the German
transmogrification of the second half
of my surname, and sent them to some
overseas lutenists—total strangers at that—
without a return address or explanation.
The music was clearly in a baroque style,
but not always in character, being grim and
morose as would have befitted the music of
an entirely different era.
Then I lost track of all this for more
than five years. Eventually the rumors
of mysterious and interesting lute music
trickled back to me, so armed with a
PC and the internet, I produced some
paramusicological mythology, explaining
the range of styles from 1680 to 1840 with
four generations of purported composers,
all from the same family. This caper later
resulted in a few musicological scandals,
which gave me some professional repute
as a competent “baroque” composer
and a modicum of respect from lutenist
colleagues, while causing considerable
irritation for the few detractors, who were
oblivious to the literary mystification/hoax
culture prevalent in Europe since the late
eighteenth century.
After many flame wars and a few op-ed
accusations of Ossianic immorality—some
accusers were oblivious of the quotations
from Beethoven, Reger, and Giazotto that
I’d used in a baroque context—I earned
some great friends for whom music’s quality
is paramount to its pedigree. Not least of
these are Luca Pianca, the founder of Il
Giardino Armonico, who premiered my
pieces in his concerts at several international
festivals, and American lutenist Robert
Barto, who is featured in several of my
video installations.
Roman Turovsky-Savchuk playing his lute. Photo by Luba Roitman.
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Then came other momentous developments. One was the growth of the internet, which gave me a way to connect
with many colleagues worldwide, and
another my renewed interest in Ukrainian
musical culture in general, and its baroque
period in particular. Ukrainian folk music
is unique in many respects. The vast
majority of it is in the minor keys. Even
the happy music is more often than not
still minor, only at a faster tempo. It is also
probably the best documented of all folk
music, with many compendia collected
since the eighteenth century. Ukrainian
folk music had a period of popularity in
Western Europe around 1800, and it left
its mark on some composers, not the
least Beethoven. The literary qualities of
its texts are astounding, their imagery
profound. Its texts are often hair-raisingly
violent, as well as breathtakingly lyrical.
This music is powerful. I didn’t choose
it: it chose me. This reconnection with
Ukrainian music was a true epiphany, from
which I—as a displaced individual—gained
a sense of total rootedness in that Old
World, paradoxically in harmony with my
American identity built in the tribulations
of immigration.
My familiarity with existential angst was
counterbalanced with happiness found
in cultural memory, the memory of old
songs amid new forms: bridges, highways,
and skyscrapers of the New World. It
later found expression in several video
installations for which I also composed
and produced the soundtracks. These
installations were built around a clear
central principle, according to which each
sequence represented an increment in the
voyage through forbidding space, where
the only available means to remain afloat
were certain personal cultural memories,
remnants, or fragments of beauty in the
decidedly unbeautiful universe. In my case,
these means were the auditory memories
of my early childhood, specifically the
memories of polyphonic laments sung by
girls while crossing the river in the evening
to milk the cows grazing on the other side.
In 2000, I undertook some research
into the history of Torban, the Ukrainian
variety of the lute. The literature for
this instrument did not survive, as it
was largely an oral culture, and so I
began to use Ukrainian melodies in my
compositions as reconstructions of this
lost musical microcosmos. In time I
began to experiment with progressively
earlier musical styles—early Renaissance
and late medieval—in combination with
those Ukrainian folk melodies that were
archaic in character and could easily be
manipulated using the compositional
techniques of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The milkmaids’ choirs of my
early memories were a perfect match to
diminutions and variation cycles for lute
in the style of Joan Ambrosio Dalza,
Francesco da Milano, or John Dowland.
This project has been nearly ten years in the
making and now numbers more than five
hundred pieces. I initially called these pieces
“Cantiones Sarmaticae,” which were later
augmented with “Cantiones Ruthenicae”
and “Cantiones Sarmatoruthenicae,” “Balli
Ruteni” and “Balli Sarmatici,” in a nod to
Sarmatism, a cultural movement in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Each of these cycles was progressively
more adventurous and complex, so I
later gave them the collective title of
“Mikrokosmos,” in an insolent lutenistic
challenge to Béla Bartók’s homonymous
keyboard cycle. In the process of
composition, I discovered not only multiple
structural similarities between Ukrainian
dance melodies and Renaissance dances
from Western Europe, but also evidence
that some late Renaissance melodies
survived in Ukrainian folk music. I was
also struck with the medieval sound of the
folk polyphony of the Polissya region of
Ukraine, from which my family came. These
observations became inspirations, and the
music flowed—in strict style, but with
unusual cadences and forbidden intervals
of the land. Such were my Dialogues with
Time.
This music has gradually earned respect
from lute players, and many colleagues who
were total strangers to me, connected only
by the internet, began to perform these
pieces, record them, and eventually film
them for YouTube. Among these musicians
I should mention Robert Barto, Luca
Pianca, Rob MacKillop, Christopher Wilke,
Ernst Stolz, Daniel Shoskes, Stuart Walsh,
Jindřich Macek, and Trond Bengtson.
Most of them I have not met in person to
date. I have also had several collaborative
electroacoustic projects with Dutch avantgarde
composer, lutenist, and carillonist
Hans Kockelmans, who has written a
number of contreparties to my scores. The most rewarding aspect of it all has
been the totally unexpected appreciation
of Ukrainian music by musicians who had
no familiarity with Ukrainian culture. I was
equally surprised by the sensitivity with
which they interpreted this material.
All of these projects remain works in
progress, and in the meantime, I have put
all of my music online for lutenists’ free
use. The projects involving Ukrainian
Renaissance lute may be found at http://www.torban.org/mikrokosmos.html and the
baroque lute project at http://www.torban.org/torban4c.html.
In 2003, I made the acquaintance
of Julian Kytasty, the finest traditional
Ukrainian epic singer and kobzar-bandurist
in the West. We became good friends, and
he later became my teacher. He eventually
asked me to accompany him in his projects
centered on the baroque period and
occasionally to sing in them. We have had
unusual concepts for our concert programs,
drawing from material rarely touched
nowadays, such as penitential chants and
psalms and songs about violent historical
events, evil and treachery, marital and erotic
mayhem, and the miseries of war in a land
that was split between two empires (Russian
and Austro-Hungarian), whose inhabitants
were forced to kill each other senselessly by
callow foreign royalty.
Julian and I received a folk ar ts
apprenticeship grant in 2008 from the
New York State Council on the Arts, which
enabled us to work together for two years
on the traditional epic style and repertoire,
which by then had become one of my main
interests. Through Julian, I also met Nina
Matvienko and Mariana Sadovska, two
great Ukrainian folk singers of our time.
I also began many virtual friendships with
great folk singers, notably with Natalya
Polovinka and Volodymyr Kushpet. In
the spring of 2009, I undertook a journey
to Kyiv, after a thirty-year absence. There
I had good fortune of meeting Taras
Kompanichenko and Eduard Drach, the
finest carriers of the epic singer-kobzar
tradition in Ukraine, and was able to adapt
some of their repertoire to the baroque lute for my own use. They also inspired several
variation sets on Ukrainian melodies in
baroque and early classical styles.
After the period of fakeloric music
artificially imposed on Ukraine during the
Soviet era, there is now a real revival of
the epic tradition in Ukraine, with kobzar
guilds established in Kyiv and Kharkiv and
many talented young musicians studying not
only performance, but also lutherie. There
is also a revival afoot of the traditional folk
polyphony, and there are several excellent
choirs specializing in that repertoire—
notably Bozhychi, Hurtopravtsi, Drevo,
Strila, and Korali—as well as ensembles that
specialize in Ukrainian early music. All of
these groups face many difficulties in the
cultural wars stemming from three centuries
of forced Russification of Ukraine, as well
as hostility from the commercial media
and music establishments and the large
Russian minority, which still harbors anti-
Ukrainian sentiments. But the groups active
in authentic folk music are multiplying, and
there are grounds for cautious optimism
that this music will live on.
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Roman Turovsky-Savchuk is an American
lutenist, composer, and painter. Born in
Ukraine, he has lived in New York City
since 1979. His work is informed by both
the American reality and Ukrainian cultural
memory. He is currently completing
a series of video installations, as well as
radio broadcasts of his music for Dutch
radio. Examples of his work can be seen
on his web site, http://turovsky.org.
In the process of
composition, I discovered not only multiple
structural similarities between Ukrainian
dance melodies and Renaissance dances
from Western Europe, but also evidence
that some late Renaissance melodies
survived in Ukrainian folk music. I was
also struck with the medieval sound of the
folk polyphony of the Polissya region of
Ukraine, from which my family came.
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 37, Fall-Winter 2011. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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