UCMF 2024 Program Notes

Program Notes UCMF 2024: Crossing Borders The fifth season of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival will celebrate Crossing Borders, Ukrainian music made and played beyond the geographical borders of Ukraine as well as works that engage new mediums and alternative art forms and genres. All the composers presented as part of this year’s festival have lived and worked outside Ukraine for various reasons from emigration to education, employment to escape and exile. As part of this theme, we will be honoring the UkrainianAmerican composer Virko Baley who is 85 this year. The 2024 Festival takes place a decade after the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, a decade since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

March 28 Concert 1: Defense, Defiance, Dedication: New Ukrainian Music | 7pm Program: Roman Grygoriv (b.1984), Langsam 9M27K [music as purification ritual] 9’ Performed by Grygoriv + NYUCME This piece premiered on Ukraine’s Constitution Day, June 28, 2023. The composer Roman Grygoriv played the piece on the missile at St Andrew’s Church in Kyiv, accompanied by the “Kyivska Camerata” orchestra. Roman engaged in a symbolic ceremony using the BM-27 Uragan rocket to convey a powerful message: a heartfelt wish for the safety and security of Ukrainian cities and villages, hoping that they would never be threatened by missiles again.

Karmella Tsepkolenko (b.1955), Cantata “Reading History” [music as self-defense] 10’ Performed by Vira Slywotzky, soprano, Valeriya Sholokhova, cello + Margarita Rovenskaya, piano Tsepkolenko along with her family, stayed in her hometown of Odesa to fight in the war. In response to the cancellation of 2022’s “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music” festival, Tsepkolenko created a series of concerts “Ukrainian women creators with their own weapons” of the works written during the war under the motto “Music is our weapon”. This is the first piece of this series.

As a result of the war, some members of the ensemble Senza Sforzando now live in Tsepkolenko’s house, including soprano Tetiana Muliar-Ohorodnyk - soloist of choir of Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre, cellist Yevgen Dovbysh and pianist Oleksandr Perepelytsia - both soloists of National Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra, which inspired Tsepkolenko to write a work for them.

In terms of form, Tsepkolenko wanted to create a cantata that would be like a mini opera - with solo episodes of cello and pianom choosing Oksana Zabuzhko’s poem “Reading history” for the text. The recording was organized in Tsepkolenko’s house, where a special interior was created in the living room, which was also decorated with modern paintings and painted bottles (by Oleksandr Perepelytsia). The last words of the poem by Oksana Zabuzhko are very symbolic and best describe the situation in extrapolation to Ukraine - Rome - still stands, as it was, and the barbarian - the barbarian will be.

Maxim Kolomiiets (b.1981), Footprints on the Sun [music as defiance] 14’ Performed by NYUCME

This is something impossible, because we don't know how to leave footprints on the sun. And yet that's what we try to do every day. We try to leave a memory of ourselves. Of our lives. We try to prolong ourselves in history with some kind of "footprint on the sun." And many of us, if not all of us, who attempt to do this will likely be burned by that sun. But despite this, we continue to try to leave our footprints on the sun. This play is about the feeling of the impossible. About feeling fragile and allconsuming fire at the same time. It's about overcoming yourself and going beyond the imaginary.

Zoltan Almashi (b.1975), Maria’s City [music as dedication] 11’ version for two cellos Performed by Valeriya Sholokhova + Sofia Nowik When the war started, Almashi believed that his music was over and that it was the time to master weapons. But his friends convinced them that everyone has their battleground.

At the suggestion of conductor Oksana Lyniv, Almashi started to work under a piece for strings which is his reflection on the existential horror in Ukraine. The disaster in Mariupol makes clear that the crimes there are on a galactic scale. Almashi is convinced that Mariupol should be shouted at all over the world so he decided to shout with his music… «City of Mary» is like a fragile plant, breaking through the rubble, piles of stones and concrete, which remained on the site of destroyed houses. Eventually, life must win. Almashi believes in the victory of Ukraine!

Olga Zaitseva-Herz (b.1987), Bakhmut Rhapsody [music as testimony] 15’ [WORLD PREMIERE] Performed by Olha Zaitseva, Valeriya Sholokhova, Margarita Rovenskaya, Vira Slywotzky, + Marichka Marczyk Olga´s current piece, "Bakhmut Rhapsody" forms an integral part of her contemporary opera, "When the Sirens Sing." Grounded in the real-life stories of present-day female refugees, this work draws a poignant parallel with the tragic historical echoes of Holodomor.

The composition delves into the devastating impact of Russia´s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, intertwining original field recordings into the musical fabric. It also incorporates poetry by Lesya Ukrainka and Taras Shevchenko, whose verses now seem stunningly prophetic in this context, elaborated into arias within the body of the opera.

The composition includes a recording of Ukrainian folk singing, a poignant artifact from one of the last ethnographic fieldwork expeditions conducted around Bakhmut before the settlements were erased by military actions.

Leonid Hrabovsky (b.1935), EQVIN [music as warning] 18:30’’ Performed by Alexander Yakub, violin + Forrest Eimhold, piano EQVIN for Violin and Piano has been commissioned by the violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv for the programs Music at the Institute in Ukrainian Institute of America and was premiered in May 2022 at UIA ( Solomiya Ivakhiv - violin, Steven Beck - piano), and on May 2, 2023 it was performed in a Sunday concert at the Transfiguration Church, 1 East 29 St., NYC (Sasha Yakub - violin, Forrest Eimhold piano).

The work is dedicated to the memory of Hrabovsky’s father, violinist/violist Olexander Hrabovsky, who was perished, together with millions other victims, in the infamous tsunami of repressions committed by Stalin communist regime in 1937, and is a depiction in music of his tragic destiny.

Note on concert: Since the start of Russia’s current war against Ukraine, Ukrainian music has taken on new purposes.

Each of the works on this program has a function, but their utility goes beyond conventional music for purpose–entertainment, education, …–and serves a function for the composer and their audiences directly related to Ukraine’s last decade.

March 29 Concert 2: Virko Baley at 85 (Вірко Балей - 85) | 7pm Pre Concert talk by Virko // Kyle Gann and Peter Schmelz Program: Baley, Nocturnal No. 5 (15’) – with short filmed introduction and video of piano Performed by Laura Spitzer, piano Baley, SOLILOQUIES & A DIALOGUE [World premiere] (14 minutes) Performed by Timothy Hoft, piano + Anastasia Petanova, flute Baley, Nocturnal No. 7 for piano Performed by Timothy Hoft Baley, From Dreamtime 1. Adam’s Apple 2. Tears 3. Hour of the Wolf, 9’ Performed by Ginevra Petrucci, flute, Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet, Valeriya Sholokhova, violin, Yuliya Basis, cello, Andriy Didorenko, piano + Sean Statser, percussion Baley, Treny IV for 2 cellos and soprano, 18’ - to be dedicated to war Performed by Valeriya Sholokhova, Julia Henderson, + Olga Pasichnyk (Warsaw Chamber Opera) “Treny were born out of some inner necessity,” Baley says; “of that I’m certain.” He had wanted to write something for two talented young cellists now residing in the United States, Natalia Khoma and Suren Bagratuni, and for the Polish-based Ukrainian soprano, Olga Pasichnyk. Pasichnyk was interested in Renaissance music, so Baley’s discovery of the 1995 translation of Kochanowski’s centuries-old meditations on loss, despair, and the strength of the human spirit seemed fortuitous. At around the same time, though, he lost his mother, Lidia Baley, after a long illness; his close friend Bruce Adams died suddenly; and Larysa Silvestrov, wife of his longtime friend and fellow composer Valentin Silvestrov, also died. Under such circumstances, Baley found that Kochanowski’s poetry struck a chord deep within. “Right from the start I wanted to write a tetralogy for two cellos and soprano,” he recalls.

“A big, abstract music drama in the first three parts, with words – finally! – joining in the last... the culmination.”

In Treny, the theme is heard in many different forms, and, towards the end of the first movement, it appears in several transpositions in rapid succession: “That particular nucleus of notes,” Baley points out, “is contained in a Ukrainian folk song that Boris Lyatoshynsky used in his big Third Symphony.” As noted above, one of the threnodies in Part III is dedicated to Lyatoshynsky. The Treny theme and the Lamento progression become intertwined in ingenious ways during the course of this 4-part work. The two whole steps and one half step of the Lamento make up the interval of a fourth (A down to E, in the example given above). The inversion of that interval (A going up to E, in this case) would be a perfect fifth – the second half of the Treny theme.

So throughout Treny, various types of fourths and fifths are used prominently. The idea, Baley notes, “is as old as the hills.” The trick, then, is to do something new with the idea. “Almost every combination of the twelve notes has been used by composers over the last 300 years,” he says. “There are no new combinations, but new ways of thinking with them.” Baley chooses his words with care: notice that he says thinking with the notes, not about them. Art, he says, cannot be about itself; that is only craft.

Baley likens it to bar work for a dancer: essential, but in the end just a technical exercise. In Treny, Baley uses diminished fifths and augmented fifths throughout – intervals that function here as a contraction and expansion of the perfect fifth. On a deeper level, these intervals also add an emotional intensity to the work. And, used in conjunction with the minor second, they weave the piece’s two main themes together throughout Treny, holding its disparate parts together and, with their slightly exotic sounds, helping to give the work its “Slavic soul”.

Treny IV “Treny IV,” Baley states, “is the point to which the previous three parts were leading. It is the work’s emotional epicenter and its final resolution.” It is here, finally, that the soprano appears, to give words to the voice crying out in the desert. Baley was moved by the English translation of Jan Kochanowski’s poetry by Seamus Heaney and Stanislaw Baranczak; but he chose to set the original Polish text in Treny IV. Or to be more specific, he chose to set excerpts from Kochanowski’s cycle of poems.

Treny IV begins with an Introitus (track 18) – and without words, as the soprano hums and sings a lyrical, beautiful vocalise. The cellos, playing together again and once more back in their scordatura tuning, join in only during the last few seconds of the introduction. The first tren in the final movement (track 19) is a setting of the following excerpt: Man is not stone; his wounds run deep; His joys are like a scar on top; And once it’s touched, that buried ache Throbs wide awake.

And I, who never wrote To court a living ear, have tuned my note To appease the dead; in vain, alas!

Again, this lament is to be sung and played freely, as if there were no bar lines written. The first cello sometimes doubles the soprano, and near the end of the lament both cellos follow the soprano line in canon:

The second lament (track 20) is a brief, almost epigrammatic setting: Wisdom for me was castles in the air; I’m hurled, like the rest, from the topmost stair.

The melody is a flowing one, for all that it is quite chromatic and contains several leaps of register. The mood by the end is one of ambiguity, a mood that continues in the third tren (track 21).

Throughout this lament, both the voice and the cellos skirt the two major themes of the piece. Only in the last phrase does the soprano sing the Treny motif in its unvarnished, minor-second/perfect fifth form. This trenends with the second cello offering a variant and an inversion of the Lamento theme.

The fourth lament (track 22) is perhaps the closest of all to a conventional song. The melody is fairly restrained – less chromatic and mainly avoiding wild leaps from one register to another. The accompaniment is largely built around a progression of chords – an unusual sequence, to be sure, but a chord progression nonetheless.

The full text of this tren is as follows: But when the Parcae cease to spin Their thread, when sorrow enters in, When death knocks at the door, at last We stand aghast.

After the last line, words fail, and the two cellos continue their somber sequence of chords without the soprano.

The fifth and final tren (tracks 23 - 25) is a setting of the longest excerpt Baley has chosen from the Kochanowski poems: You weep in vain,” my friends will say.

But then, What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?

All is in vain! We play at blindman’s buff Until hard edges break into our path.

Man’s life is error. Where, then, is relief?

In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?

Here the soprano’s tender, expressive melody is doubled in harmonics by the first cello – adding a ghostly presence in the already surreal atmosphere. The second cello, meanwhile, offers an obsessive series of inversions of the Lamento theme. At the phrase, “all is in vain” (track 24), the second cello recalls briefly the F# and B drone heard in Treny III. The intensity builds, as the first lines of the text are sung again and then, when the soprano stops momentarily, the cellos plunge into a purely instrumental passage of roiling emotion. The last two lines of the text (track 25) are sung by the soprano with virtually no accompaniment at all – truly a lone voice crying out.

Treny concludes with another envoi, “ a fragment of an ever–resounding and eternal wake,” Baley says. After mourning the loss of three people close to him in Treny III, Baley describes the conclusion of Treny as “an attempt to ‘wrestle down my grief”. After the soprano has sung those words to conclude this final lament, we return to a realm beyond words, and the two cellos perform a postlude marked

“Allegretto fantastico”. The composer’s beloved quintuplet figures hover over the double-stop/singlestop pattern that has appeared throughout the work.

Here, at the end of the piece, the purpose of the alternating double- and single-stops is revealed, as the second cello spins out a series of variants on the Lamento theme. The last word, as it were, is left to the second cello, as the Lamento theme fades away into emptiness.

In Treny, Virko Baley offers an honest and emotional response to human mortality. “I think what I am after,” muses the composer, “is capturing some kind of internal truth (with a small ‘t’).” When it comes to the great questions of life and death, of why and what comes after, Treny’s uncertain ending suggests that a small, internal truth is perhaps the only kind there is.

— Notes by John Schaefer, WNYC Radio, New York Baley, Postludium: Tren No. 10: Uniforms of Snow, 2’30” All performers on concert

March 30 Concert 3: Travel Diaries | 8pm Program: Valentyn Sylvestrov, Silent Songs: Farewell, world, 5’ Performed by Hans Tashjian, bass baritone + Anna Keiserman, piano Steve Reich, Different Trains (II. Europe), 8’ Performed by The Rhythm Method Marian Fil, Devaldi Korbes (12’) Performed by Valeriya Sholokhova, cello + Yuliya Basis, piano Of this piece the composer says: “The title itself is already quite mystical and enigmatic, just like the music. If you play around with different combinations of letters and languages, the title can be deciphered as ‘Rooms of the Devil’; I don’t want to reveal all the secrets of the piece; am sure that you will feel everything by yourselves. I finished writing the piece in Germany, on the border between France and Switzerland. It was a special conclusion with sorrow for Lviv and Ukraine. In every composition, I always wish for the listener to find something familiar and native in it, and I hope that you will find it.”

Stefania Turkevych, Songs 15’ Performed by Jennifer Gliere, soprano + Alexander Chaplinskiy, piano 1. Emigration Elegy 3’ (Text by Stepan Maslak) Written in the 1960s, with its descending motifs, the art song evokes the hopelessness felt by the composer as a result of her ongoing disappointments with her musical career in England.

2. A Mountain Lass. 2’ (Text by Vira Vovk) The girl from the Carpathian Mountains sings of the supernatural beauty of her homeland and of her indescribable longing and homesickness while living in a foreign land. Wherever it was, Ukrainian émigrés often felt uprooted and unfulfilled in their adopted homelands.

3. Silver Song 5’ (Text by Vira Vovk)

This is one of the most lyrical art songs written by Turkevych. It too is dedicated to Nyzhankivsky.

An evocative text finds the author embracing new horizons with one cherished treasure carried forward from the past — a silver song.

4. The Assumption 2’ (Text by Vira Vovk) After immigrating to England, Turkevych wrote a number of art songs to the words of her daughter’s childhood friend—Vira Vovk. The poetry contains many Ukrainian themes presented in a surrealistic manner. “The Assumption” combines images of nature and religious mysticism within a luminous musical texture.

5. Evening Dance 3’ (Text by Vira Vovk) In Ukraine, during autumn and winter, evening parties were organized by matchmakers for young people to come and get acquainted. Here a young beauty is being unsuccessfully courted by a lad. The art song, however, is dedicated to the composer’s successful son-in-law, tenor Oleh Nyzhankivsky.

Mykhailo Chedryk, Sonare [World premiere] (13’) Performed by Ginevra Petrucci, flute, Hsuan-Fong Chen, oboe, Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet, Mike Lormand, trombone, Valeriya Sholokhova, cello, Tristan Kasten-Krause, double bass, and Sean Statser, percussion Sonare For Double Bass And Ensemble," akin to the Chedryk 's other works, abstains from drawing inspiration from external sources. The composer's objective is to craft a sonic field that prompts the audience to ponder, "What are their impressions of these structured, human-made sounds?" The title "Sonare..." mirrors this foundational concept.

This composition signifies a continuation of the Chedryk’s artistic exploration of the Double Bass as a solo instrument. It marks the progression from showcasing the instrument in isolation on stage to its role as a soloist interwoven with other instruments within the ensemble.

Chedryk endeavors to create a lush, intense sonic field, with a particular emphasis on low frequencies, where the double bass resonates most profoundly from their perspective. Filled with an array of extended techniques, the composition aims for disparate sounds to synergistically enhance one another, resulting in a nuanced and intricate palette of colors. *Director’s Note: Chedryk’s other compositions with the title Sonare have been written and performed in Ukraine and Germany. This World Premiere was written specifically for performance in New York at UCMF. In this way, it is part of a migrating musical collection.

Ksenia Stetsenko, Fluchtlingesdodekaphonie for two clarinets, 3’ Performed by Gleb Kanasevich + Paul Cho Translated from German, this piece is titled “Refugee Dodecaphony.” The number 24 is not accidental, as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th. “24” is also significant because “The Law on the Legal Status of Foreign Nationals” (which has come to be known by refugees as simply “The 24th Paragraph”), regulates policy regarding temporarily displaced persons from Ukraine in Germany – the country where the composer found shelter when writing the piece. Additionally, the title of the miniature has 24 letters, and the music itself consists of 24 measures: 24 measures of emotional experiences, going in circles amidst total uncertainty and wandering the world in search of home. Being a refugee means standing on unstable ground. Losing your past life on one hand, and

having nothing yet solidified in the new life on the other. Extreme insecurity and fragility is represented through the 12-tone system. A flicker of hopeful homecoming is expressed through the harmonious resolution of the conclusion. The piece was premiered by Pavlo Burdeinyi and Oleksandr Nesterov at Lviv Organ Hall in April of 2023.

Kaia Saariaho, Changing Light for soprano and violin 5‘ Performed by Jennifer Gliere + Leah Asher Note on concert: Each of the pieces on this program evoke a story of travel: escape, emigration, education and employment abroad, eternal farewell. The works of the youngest generation of Ukrainian composers, born between 1997 and 2000, are paired with established voices from Ukraine, including the country’s most famous living composer and two of contemporary music’s leading figures.