A Successor to the Ukrainian Sages

Taras KOMPANYCHENKO is a modern-day kobzar, a member of the Kobzar Guild of Kyiv, soloist with the Akademiya Tradytsiy International Choir and the rock group Karpatiyany. He is a virtuoso performer specializing in the kobza, bandura, lira (hurdy-gurdy), and bagpipe. He performs songs in Ukrainian, Old Church Slavonic, Old Polish, French, and German dating from the Middle Ages, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1918-22, along with popular and little-known folk songs. He finds old music in archives, libraries, and private collections across Europe. This kobza and lira-player is an indefatigable participant in international folk fests, where he conducts master classes in Ukrainian folk choreography and kobza-lira performing traditions.

When he sings baroque songs he looks like a student of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the days of Petro Mohyla. Striking up a nineteenth-century romance, he is transformed into a handsome Ukrainian Casanova-like nobleman. Taras is a natural in any epoch.

He was also an active participant in national democratic movements in the early 1990s, as well as in the current Orange Revolution.

Taras KOMPANYCHENKO was invited to join The Day’s roundtable and we started by asking him to play something.

T.K.: That was a religious chant called “Thank Our Lord Jesus Christ” dating from the late sixteenth century. These chants emerged in Ukraine in place of psalms, under the influence of the Reformation. A large number of aristocratic Ukrainian families sent their children to study at European universities in Padua, Sorbonne, and Krakow. Some students remained true to their forefathers’ Catholic or Eastern Orthodox faiths, but others succumbed to various Protestant trends and became Calvinists, Lutherans, or Arians. This led to the emergence of what became known as prayers said outside churches. Prayer songs sung at home became very popular in the court of Prince Kostiantyn of Ostroh.

The instrument that I just played is a reconstruction of Ostap Veresai’s kobza, based on Mykola Lysenko’s drawings. The original instrument eventually found its way to the Tarnavsky Museum in Chernihiv, but got lost before or during World War II. For all we know, it could be stored at the Conservatory of St. Petersburg or at the Glinka Museum in Moscow, or maybe somewhere in Munich, considering that Ivan Mazepa’s torban [an unusual instrument from the lute family common to Ukraine and whose popularity spanned 250 years from about 1690 to 1920] was discovered in that city.

There are many kinds of kobzas. The word originates from kobuzu, a Turkish string instrument. Originally it had two strings, then three, and finally eight-i.e., four double strings that are common to all European lutes. It was quite popular with the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the 16th-17th centuries, proof of which are paintings of Cossack Mamai or Cossack Hrytsko from Zaporizhia.

The Kobza Guild, of which I am a member, specializes in reconstructing musical instruments, such as the lute, kobza, bandura, and lira. At present, guild members use these instruments to perform strictly Cossack repertoires, although only a handful of musicians in Ukraine play Ostap Veresai’s kobza [i.e., its reconstructed version — Transl. ], namely Volodymyr Kushpet, Yuri Barashovets, Eduard Drach, and their younger counterparts Andriy Bilous, Taras Shushailo, and yours truly.

(Taras performs an early 17th century fiery Cossack dance)

T.K: The musical score for this dance was discovered in a collection in Bratislava. Quite a few of them can be found in collections that were published in Europe at the time. They have different titles like Baletto Ruteno or Horea Rutenia, meaning Ruthenian Ballet. Old British scores contain titles like Horea Polonia, or Polish Ballet. Part of Ukraine was under the Polish crown at the time, so dances originating from that period often betray intonations germane to both Ukrainian and Polish art; they are from our common cultural treasure-trove.

UKRAINIAN BASTION

Taras, you are a young musician who plays a “Veresai kobza.” In a way, you are the successor to latter-day Ukrainian sages. How would you explain this phenomenon?

T.K.: When I was a little boy, my father gave me a bandura as a present. Since then, I have never parted with this instrument. My parents did their best to raise me in the Ukrainian spirit and milieu, in which people sang Ukrainian songs only with their families and close friends, never in public, and also celebrated Christmas and Easter; where people made handwritten copies of Ulas Samchuk’s Maria and Lesia Ukrainka’s Boyarynia, Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification, the letters of Viacheslav Chornovil, and listened to homemade tapes of Vasyl Stus’s poetry and Yevhen Adamtsevych’s Cossack March.

(With great emotion Taras proceeds to recite the following lines from Lesia Ukrainka’s Boyarynia)

My father gave his vote for Moscow
At the Council of Pereyaslav,
He kept his word, as they all did,
Tempted by the devil.
‘At the time, no one
Was sure of the outcome, my son.
Also, few would dare betray
The oath they’d sworn.’
‘So turning traitor to Ukraine is best, I guess?’
‘My father never did that to Ukraine,
He served her under the tsar not worse
Than all his foes did under the Polish crown.’
‘Of course, what little difference is there,
Licking Polish boots or Moscow’s...’

[T.K.:] Later, my father enrolled me in a music school where I was the only boy in the bandura class, because the stereotype at the time was that only girls should play the instrument — like those bandura trios Klynonka or Malvy. A weird kind of instrument-playing emancipation was taking place under the Soviets. The first female bandurist choirs emerged in the early 1920s. Women had indeed been involved with Kobzar guilds, singing religious songs, even ballads for two or more voices. This reminds me of Yavdokha Pylypenko. But they had never played banduras, kobzas or liras.

Probably the reason is that the male hormone had been squeezed out of culture. Men playing kobzas or banduras were reminiscent of Ukraine’s past glory...

T.K.: Right. Even the repertoire was essentially changed. Practically no epic numbers were allowed and the rest could only be performed using abridged scores, like Oy Moroze, Morozenku, Oy, na hori ta zhentsi zhnut, Za svit staly kozachenky — three historical songs that were officially okayed at the time. An old kobzar repertoire included more important pieces.

I was looking for very beautiful but obscure, even unknown, songs. I was happy to play something no one had performed before me. I was so eager to surprise my audiences. My friend Slava Kryklyvy loved Ukrainian songs like Nese Halia vodu and Ty zh mene pidmanula, but since childhood I thought of them as primitive. I wanted to come up with something truly Ukrainian but very spectacular. I did now and then.

As I grew up, my father was working on a new plan; he wanted me to become an artist. Somehow he chose Kosiv, a town in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. There I found myself in an environment where everybody and everything, intellectuals and even the prostitutes were genuinely Ukrainian. In a word, it was a Ukrainian stronghold. The dorm I was in followed “hazing” laws and was divided into older residents who gave orders and exacted unquestioning obedience from the younger ones. At first they tried to humiliate me and make me follow the rules, but then they discovered I was a bandurist. In Kosiv, the bandura was the epicenter of cultural life. Eventually I began recording Striltsi and insurgents’ songs. The locals sang songs about the Cossacks, but they were actually singing about the Sich Riflemen and OUN and UPA fighters. Their songs had a modern innovative touch to them. This was the mid-1980s. The rejuvenated periodical Ukraine was being published, along with the magazines Kyiv and Vitchyzna.

I was invited to perform at the International Friendship Club and on one occasion I played and sang the Ballad of Lenin followed by Za bairakom bairak, which was taboo at the time, especially in Halychyna. The club manager rushed backstage, clutching his hair and shouting, “Taras, what have you done? This is a disaster!” Unpleasant official repercussions followed, but nothing disastrous. By the way, the Ballad of Lenin from the repertoire of the bandurist Fedir Zharko is a very good composition. One version of this duma about the leader of the proletariat was written by Maksym Rylsky specially for Yehor Movchan in order to save those kobzars who had refused to attend the convention in Kharkiv, where everyone would be destroyed. So those old men had to sing it to survive.

After that I studied at the Institute of Art in Lviv, and then arranged to be transferred to the Ukrainian Academy of Art in Kyiv. Studying at both of these institutions of higher learning helped me develop a scholarly approach to repertoire. I was on the lookout for old songs to show that there were things of remarkable value to be found in every historical and cultural period in Ukraine. Thus, romances were popular in the nineteenth century. This is an elegiac genre performed on a seven- string guitar or piano with cello accompaniment, mostly favored by old aristocratic “Little Russian” families.

Taras, how did you become a member of the Kobza Guild? How did you meet the veteran kobzars Heorhy Tkachenko and Mykola Budnyk?

T.K.: Oles Badio, a sculptor friend of mine, took me to Mykola Budnyk’s hut in the vicinity of the Botanical Gardens in Kyiv; it has been torn down. There were many half-finished bandura materials in the attic. Later, he established a workshop for making this instrument. He did a great deal to revive the true Ukrainian kobzar art.

Mykola Budnyk, God rest his soul, became my teacher. He taught me to play the “Old World” bandura and I fell in love with it. At the time I listened to all kinds of music with youthful enthusiasm and I thought I could detect an age-old grief in every interpretation. I felt the bandura could and did convey that grief. I promptly included such pieces in my repertoire. These Striltsi and other insurgents’ songs and carols are well known today but they were obscure at the time. Somehow chants like the ones about the celebrated Varvara seemed primitive compared to cosmological carols, although I realized they were part of the baroque culture.

Through my teacher I met Heorhy Tkachenko, the head of the Kobzar Guild, who is a landscape architect and splendid watercolorist. Communicating with him, I realized that he was a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. I would even describe him as a man of the age. Born in the late nineteenth century, he went through ordeals, seeking ideals, finding his faith, and asserting it. And he remained his true intellectual self, sharing with his younger pupils what he held as true life values. Actually, it was from him that we learned to understand the main kobzar aesthetic concepts; we had to perform what our hearts told us was true, not false pathos.

Our Kobzar Guild is opposed to modern bandura-playing techniques. We believe that our opponents — and by this I refer to the whole system of music education — utterly ignore the kobza- and lira-playing traditions as aesthetic rules, also in terms of instrument design and repertoire. They, in turn, accuse us of cultivating a museum approach, saying we are obsolete and that they represent a modern and praiseworthy sequel to the kobzar tradition. Personally, I think that a worthy sequel can only stem from a thorough knowledge of the tradition per se. The Hindu sitar school and that of the Arab (Persian, Turkish) udu can serve as analogs of the Ukrainian kobza school, where performance skills are rooted exclusively in the traditional musical culture.

For some reason musicians who specialize in the kobza or bandura are called kobzars here. That’s a strange concept. We have an excellent bandurist by the name of Roman Hrynkiv, but he has never referred to himself as a kobzar. Or take Kostiantyn Novytsky, a virtuoso bandurist with a number of gifted students who play Italian and German music. There are many views on the kobza-playing art, and each one moves in its own direction.

MISSION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Why do you think the kobzar movement had to stay underground?

T.K.: The kobzars were mostly blind men. Even most of those few who survived the Stalin purges of the 1930s were blind. More often than not they lived in villages and knew only too well how our peasants lived at the time: the Holodomor, collectivization, dispossession of the kulaks, deportation to Siberia. They sang about those events. Here, let me sing these lines from kobzar Yevhen Adamtsevych’s repertoire:

“Long ago, the Tatars, Turks, and Poles
Were destroying Ukraine, like vicious dogs.
Now we see breeched bow- legged men,
Nothing’s changed, Ukraine is perishing...
So this is your reward, Ukraine, in return
For feeding the parasite, the Red executioner.”

Back in the 1950s Yevhen Adamtsevych played his kobza and sang at the bazaar of Romny, a town in Sumy oblast, from where he would be chased out by the militia. So he would blindly make his way to the path used by people going to the bazaar, sit there and continue playing. Sometimes the militia would find him there, load him in a truck, take him out of town and leave him in a field, after throwing away his bandura. The kobzar would grope his way around, crawling on all fours until he found the instrument, and then his happiness knew no bounds. Playing the kobza was his way of earning a living and creating songs and music. Adamtsevych is considered one of the most talented epic poets of the twentieth century.

At the time, the authorities were busy destroying churches and demoralizing the Christian community at large, while the kobzars continued to sing religious songs glorifying the saints and the Pochayiv Mother of God. They composed songs to nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry, including the works of the poets Yakiv Shchoholiv, certainly Taras Shevchenko, also Mykola Vorony, Spyrydon Cherkasenko, Hryhory Chuprynka. Their songs awakened Ukrainians to their national dignity, identity, and national self-preservation. What those kobzars did ran counter to Soviet ideology and it was difficult for the local authorities to keep them under control. They were never sure of the kobzars’ whereabouts and what they were singing. In fact, Yevhen Adamtsevych had a song about Shchors in his repertoire. In modern terms, the kobzar movement posed a threat to the Soviet system in that it was a cultural underground alternative — in other words, they were bards in the truest sense of the word.

Taras, what is the mission of the kobzars today?

T.K.: This mission boils down to an unobtrusive process of enlightenment. It addresses Ukrainians in the first place, also foreigners who should have a true concept of the Ukrainian past-an intellectual and eventful past with varying political preferences traced throughout our national history, along with various political and cultural venues, like St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Krakow. The names of our writers, like Stepan Yavorsky, Danylo Bratkovsky, and Ivan Velychkovsky, must be made public knowledge. It’s extremely important for the modern kobzars to remain in the epicenter of events. All of us — Eduard Drach, Yurko Fedynsky, Taras Sylonko, and I — have been out in the streets with our people for almost three weeks. Every night we played by the buildings of the Cabinet of Ministers and Presidential Administration, and on the Maidan. We all offer up prayers to the accompaniment of Ave Maria or Vivaldi’s disturbing music. We all sing Ukrainian folk, Striltsi, and other insurgents’ songs, as well as songs dating from the Ukrainian Revolution of 1918-22, like Oy u luzi chervona kalyna, My smilo v biy pidem za Ukrayinu, Chy to buria, chy to hrim. We tell our listeners about how these songs were created, about their first performers. In 1702, Semen Klymovsky of the Kharkiv Cossack Regiment composed Yikhav kozak za Dunai, which became an eighteenth- century hit. Often we are asked by people to play something: “Taras, please sing Oy u lisi na poliantsi stoyaly povstantsi!” I was asked by a middle-aged woman who said, “I’m from Nedryhailiv in Sumy oblast, this is our favorite song.” I told her, “I sure will, you’re my fellow countrywoman,” and then we hugged each other.

On another occasion we visited the tent city to offer moral support for some fellows from Luhansk. They gave me a guitar and asked me to play the key tune about bad weather from the popular Soviet movie Good-bye, Mary Poppins! And then people from Luhansk took the guitar and played the Halychyna soldier’s song Oy khmarytsia, tumanytsia!? So much for the alleged east-west confrontation in Ukraine. That’s a cock-and-bull story. Our revolution is meant to help everyone realize the grandeur of every human being.

(Taras takes his kobza and sings these lines from Yosyp Makovei’s March)

“Maybe thunder or a lightening storm,
Maybe a quake shaking the land a hundred miles,
No, it’s Ukrainian men about to take the field.
Join the ranks, line up before it’s too late...”

Taras, why do you close your eyes when you sing?

T.K.: Music is a very intimate domain for me. I do it because it’s easier to sing that way. It’s not a stage presence stunt. Some people think that I shut my eyes because I am imitating a blind kobzar, so they ask me to perform with my eyes open, saying the eyes reflect the soul. But that depends. You know, much depends on the kind of contact I can establish with my audience. I often play for different audiences. I remember riding on a commuter train to Zhmerynka late in the evening. In fact it was the last train and it was packed with people loaded down with shopping bags and cardboard boxes, heading home to the suburbs after their workday in Kyiv. Young people were smoking at both ends of the car; women sitting nearby were having supper, and a man was talking on his mobile phone. And, of course, there were Gypsy kids begging and Gypsy women tending to their babies. There I sat with my lira when someone asked me to play, so I played songs about Saint Varvara and Jesus on the Cross. Someone produced a hat and it was passed round; people put in apples, candies, and one- or two-hryvnia notes. They did it from the bottom of their hearts, for they had been in Kyiv to earn those hryvnias. I played and kept my eyes open. In between songs I would talk to people. “What’s your patriarchate?” an old woman wanted to know. “The divine one,” I told her. “Are your songs canonical?” another was anxious to know, but a woman her age, sitting next to her, scolded her: “Why don’t you leave him alone? Let the young man sing another song.”

We have special rites in our Kobzar Guild; we must play our kobzas in the street, so we can overcome our arrogance. We perform by St. Michael’s Cathedral, the Protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, or in Pyrohove.

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD

How did you join the group Karpatiyany, which was set up by the Ukrainian American Yurko Fedynsky? Would you explain the migration between the groups Karpatiyany, Khreshchaty Yar, and Bozhychi? What about the repertoire? Is it being repeated?

T.K.: The Karpatiyany is a young group that was formed less than a year ago. Its musicians have been with other groups and until recently many of them specialized in authentic music. This helps us create truly Ukrainian music, using Ukrainian material. You see, this group claims to be creating an ethnic culture. Take the song Oy, u divonky in our repertoire. How was it created? First, we worked on the Polissia carol Chom ty, ruzhenko. It sounded a bit dull and I felt it would be good to add the Subcarpathian carol Oy, u divonky, because both songs lack a tonal center. Then we added the wedding song Hra do barvinku, also a touch of artistry, which resulted in a fine concert number.

As for migration-maybe this is the wrong word, because it’s actually musicians participating extensively in a number of creative projects. Serhiy Okhrimchuk, for example, is very good at classical, jazz, folk, and modern music. He is involved in Alla Zahaikevych and Danylo Pertsev’s projects, but he can also perform with Oleh Skrypka, while remaining a standing member of Karpatiyany. Vasyl Palaniuk is a virtuoso dulcimer player; he created the folk group Khreshchaty Yar, so he plays in this group and with us. Valery Hladunets is a soloist with Bozhychi and Karpatiyany. Yurko Fedynsky is an excellent performer of Ukrainian epic songs and plays a number of instruments. He came from the States and he says he isn’t going back, because he’s found his people in Ukraine. Why not? It’s part of Karpatiyany’ reflections on the world.

Taras, would you tell us about your participation in international folk fests, particularly the annual international lira and bagpipe festival in Lisberg, near Frankfurt on the Main, where you conducted master classes on the Ukrainian kobza and lira and taught Ukrainian folk choreography?

T.K: I sing with the Akademiya Tradytsiy International Choir. It includes singers and musicians from Central and Eastern European countries united by Antoniy Pilkh who plays the Old Polish lute. Our headquarters are in a former Polish aristocratic mansion near Krakow, where we hold seminars on ancient music. We sing in Latin, German, French, Estonian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Russian, Old Polish, Old Church Slavonic (using Kyiv phonetics), and Old Ukrainian-Ruthenian.

I attend several international folk fests every year. In 2003, I took part in the renowned International Folk Festival Baltica in Latvia. President Vaira Vike-Freiberga joined the Latvian group onstage. What great importance they assign to folklore in this small country with a great people. We also visited Vilnius and Klaipeda with an exhibit of old Ukrainian musical instruments. Our concerts were a success. The Lithuanians have long distanced themselves from the Soviet concept of aesthetics, so they don’t want any ersatz performing groups; they are interested in genuinely ethnic performers.

A month ago I returned from Sweden after attending the Days of Ukrainian Culture. Ukraine was represented by the writer Yuri Andrukhovych, the composer Valentyn Sylvestrov, the Transcarpathian Folk Choir, the rock groups VV, Hurtopravtsi, and yours truly. We were told by some of the Swiss that they had learned more about Ukrainian culture and now regarded it as a European culture. Before that I visited the huge and wonderful Viva Ukraine festival in Wroclaw.

This year Lisberg near Frankfurt on the Main hosted the 31st hurdy- gurdy festival as part of a museum project founded by Kurt Reichmann, a noted painter, graphic artist, and enthusiastic campaigner for the revival of the lira. He invited Kobzar Guild musicians and the group Nadobryden to participate, expecting them to be the greatest attraction, something no one had seen or heard before. Eduard Drach and two others conducted lira master classes mostly attended by Germans and a 70-year-old lady from Sweden. All of them had learned how to play the instrument. During the festival we taught them to play psalms, a lira arrangement of a chant about Adam and Eve, and a kobza dance about trouble. Two of our students even got as far as the epos and tried to play and sing the ballad of Samiylo Kishka! That was fantastic! Ukraine instantly emerged before their eyes as an interesting country and a creative rival to be reckoned with. Apparently many of the people attending our master classes wanted to learn things like the French epic about Rolland or the Old German Song of the Nibelung, because such epic pieces were preserved in the living Ukrainian tradition until the twentieth century. Too bad Old French or Old German works can only be reconstructed on the basis of one analog or another. Every day of the festival would end in dancing. They would perform Ukrainian dances at first and I would be the coach and emcee, then Flemish, Breton, and French ones.

Kobza and lira sounds bring back memories of the dynastic Ukrainian aristocracy and that aristocratic tendency that existed in the life of the people. Taras, can you sense this demand among people of your generation and the younger generation?

T.K.: I can see our young people seeking self-identification with the rich and deep Ukrainian culture. In fact, Ukrainians were associated with varenyky, fatback, and billowing Cossack pantaloons. As I continued to study the subject, I realized that Ukrainianness was decorative to a certain degree. Ukrainians were mostly identifiable when they performed on stage; huge “academic” choirs, singing and dancing ensembles and bandura choirs were established. In actuality, they all merged into the “Soviet people,” dancing foreign dances and professing foreign values. Some people complain about having nothing to feel proud of in Ukraine. These people don’t know, for example, that Serhiy Zhadan is associated with good poetry, as Andriy Kurkov and Yuri Andrukhovych are with good prose, as Ivan Marchuk and Yevheniya Hapchynska are associated with a good artistic style; as Oleh Skrypka is with true Ukrainian rock music. This elite, these intellectuals, prove that the Ukrainian spirit has a great future and can adequately respond to modern challenges.

So what’s missing?

T.K.: The linkage between generations. Our intelligentsia, as the carrier of Ukrainian values, has suffered very heavy losses.

The British colonizers once told the Hindus that they should burn their temples and books, and admit that they were barbarians. They heard in response that the Hindu people were not barbarians but successors to their sages.

Ukrainians are also a European nation with a great literary heritage, excellent drama traditions, and interesting ancient music. We must simply learn more about our past and make it a priority issue on our current daily sociocultural agenda, so that we can rid ourselves of all our complexes and proceed as a healthy Ukrainian nation.