Maria Sonevytsky | Bard College (original) (raw)
Books by Maria Sonevytsky
Read the preface and introduction to _Wild Music_
Articles by Maria Sonevytsky
Бюлетень 53-54, 2022
Essay commission for the San Francisco Opera's 2021 staging of Eugene Onegin; republished with pe... more Essay commission for the San Francisco Opera's 2021 staging of Eugene Onegin; republished with permission in the Jan 2022 Shevchenko Scientific Society Bulletin
Topos, 2022
This brief essay reflects on the ontological question “What is Ukraine?” and pursues the urgent q... more This brief essay reflects on the ontological question “What is Ukraine?” and pursues the urgent question that follows: “…and who should define its past, present, and future?” The author develops the idea of “epistemic imperialism” to name the asymmetrical structures of global knowledge production, structures that have been revealing themselves since late February when the stakes of defining Ukraine have taken on profound urgency. The author reflects on her personal and scholarly relationships to the questions of epistemic authority and epistemic imperialism. Four additional questions are posed and evaluated: first, amid the unspeakable horrors of the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine: whose knowledge has mattered? Second, whose voices have been treated as credible and authoritative? Third, who has assumed they know what Ukraine is — or they do not need to know — before offering a diagnosis or prognosis? And fourth, how might those of us with relative power inside of the Anglophone academy think about the politics of redistribution from within the prestige economies in which we operate?
Ethnomusicology, 2022
In the Soviet Union, logics of evolutionism undergirded the Communist party-state's intervent... more In the Soviet Union, logics of evolutionism undergirded the Communist party-state's interventions into many aspects of Soviet life, including the realm of “folk music.” In this article, I draw on the example of the Soviet institutionalization of a Crimean Tatar folk orchestra to demonstrate how Soviet musical evolutionism ordered and constrained vernacular musical practices in ways that have had long-term political consequences, especially concerning the politics of post-Soviet indigeneity. I argue that to delink teleology from musical evolution—akin to how evolution is understood in the physical sciences—would take a fundamental step toward decolonizing music studies. I conclude by comparing the Soviet case to contemporary discourses of musical evolutionism, observing how it risks exiling some musics to a present that is “less evolved.” Crimean Tatar language, translated by Adel Khairutdinova, Muslim Umerov, and Ayla Bakkalli
Music & Politics, 2019
This essay offers a "soundbite ethnography" of a few key moments from the Women's March on Washin... more This essay offers a "soundbite ethnography" of a few key moments from the Women's March on Washington. Attending to moments of acoustic rupture, density, and disorientation, Sonevytsky applies Rancière's concept of dissensus and Mouffe's notion of agonistic democracy to assess potent moments of sonic micro-occupation as they occurred throughout the day. The essay concludes with a meditation on visceral knowledge and the potential of sonic ethnography in a time of societal upheaval.
Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (ed. Gavin Williams), Oxford University Press, 2018
Sonevytsky’s chapter considers the noteworthy lack of historical sources pertaining to Crimean Ta... more Sonevytsky’s chapter considers the noteworthy lack of historical sources pertaining to Crimean Tatar experiences of the War. It attempts, through analysis of what remains in sonic form, to recover experiences that have largely disappeared from cultural archives through a method of “overhearing” Crimean Tatars in outsider accounts. The chapter examines one British account of the Crimean War, and one Crimean Tatar “émigré song” anthologized by Soviet ethnographers. A closing section discusses Russia’s present-day annexation of Crimea and contemporary efforts to use musical memory as a means of political resilience.
Public Culture, 2019
This article investigates how sovereignty works in practice by attending to the aural public sphe... more This article investigates how sovereignty works in practice by attending to the aural public sphere of Crimea, as “Eastern music” is produced and circulated by the Crimean Tatar radio and as it penetrates the public spaces of microtransit. I argue that through the dissemination of “Eastern music” on the Crimean peninsula, Radio Meydan generated a new virtual space in which latent competing liminal sovereign imaginaries of Crimea, situated within the upheavals of Ukrainian instability and Russian aggression, were produced and negotiated. Through attention to the aural sphere—to the sounds that ears identify as symbolically resonant; to music, media, and the discourse that surrounds it—I argue for new ways of apprehending how sovereignty-in-practice insinuates itself into daily life and feeds the imaginaries that shape future political conditions.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016
This article considers the widely circulated video of a musical performance that took place durin... more This article considers the widely circulated video of a musical performance that took place during the social unrest that occurred in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2013-14 known as the “Maidan.” The edited video features the live performance of the piece “Hannusya” by the Ukrainian “freak cabaret” act known as the Dakh Daughters, a Kyiv-based collective of female actors and musicians known for their dramatic, collage-based musical performance pieces.. Their performance links Ukrainian nationalism, femininity, indigeneity, and Soviet anti-fascist propaganda through a surprising juxtaposition of polysemic elements. I consider how different publics read vastly different meanings into the Dakh Daughters’ video, as, alternately, a fascist call-to-arms, an ironic subversion of Russian propaganda, or a new form of progressive politics articulated as aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Secondly, I assess the shift in aesthetic values that has occurred among urban cosmopolitan musicians such as the Dakh Daughters as social unrest, revolution and war has forced the ethical implications of their aesthetic projects to the forefront. Ultimately, this has redirected aesthetic projects rooted in pastiche toward a politicized notion of ambivalence.
The 1986 nuclear accident at reactor number 4 of Ukraine’s Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Pl... more The 1986 nuclear accident at reactor number 4 of Ukraine’s Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Plant prompted the rise of an “eco-nationalism” that contributed significantly to the Ukrainian national independence movement of the late 1980s. It also resulted in the resettlement of over 200,000 Ukrainians from a zone known by ethnographers to have preserved a rich village culture of traditional folksong and ritual. This article examines the rise of the avtentyka
musical movement, which paid close attention to regional and local village styles of musical performance, in relation to the growth of movements of national identity, political sovereignty, environmental awareness, and the neo-traditionalist “Native Faith” religious movement in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Taking cues from Russian historian Dmitry Likhachev’s notion of an “ecology of culture”—influential among practitioners of avtentyka themselves—and from American ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon’s (2009) proposal for an “ecology of music,” we look at how variable notions of culture and nature played into the dynamic relations among music, identity, politics, and ecology in a context of rapid cultural and environmental change.
World of music, 2008
Musical instruments, the musician’s extra-corporeal “voice” that produces sound in time, mediate ... more Musical instruments, the musician’s extra-corporeal “voice” that produces sound in time, mediate the act of sound-making between the musician and the music and therefore constitute a unique category of “things” to subject to the question: how does an inanimate object express its “social life”? Through their morphological, metaphorical, and historical contexts, musical instruments index a variety of socially prescribed attributes. This paper tells the story of the accordion’s entanglement with “ethnic whiteness,” a stereotype closely aligned with the well-publicized biography of Lawrence Welk. The paper advocates for a new critical organological approach that seriously considers the musical instrument as an actor in the making of musical meaning. This approach is applied to two contemporary New York City-based accordionists who respond to the stereotype of “ethnic whiteness” through their musical performances and compositions, Guy Klucevsek and Rachelle Garniez.
The Harriman Review, Mar 2010
Public Ethnomusicology Projects by Maria Sonevytsky
![Research paper thumbnail of Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World [liner notes]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/40028059/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Released on Smithsonian Folkways in April 2015.
![Research paper thumbnail of No Other Home: The Crimean Tatar Repatriates [magazine & museum exhibition]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/40028474/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Triple Canopy, issue no. 4. Also published in Polish translation in Pressje (2009)., 2008
This was a collaboration with photographer Alison Cartwright. First published on "Triple Canopy" ... more This was a collaboration with photographer Alison Cartwright. First published on "Triple Canopy" (2008) and "Pressje" (Poland, 2009). Presented as a multi-media museum exhibition at the Ukrainian Museum in New York (2010), the Honchar Museum in Kyiv (2011), and returned to the Ukrainian Museum in New York (2014).
Dissertation by Maria Sonevytsky
This dissertation presents case studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups: the Crimean ... more This dissertation presents case studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups: the Crimean Tatars of Crimea, and the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains – two human collectivities that are both, today, Ukrainian by citizenship. Both of these groups also embody dominant stereotypes of otherness in Ukraine – Hutsuls as the ideal Herderian romantic folk, and Crimean Tatars as the menacing, mysterious, “oriental” other. This dissertation traces how historical stereotypes of both of these groups as “wild” have shaped and defined their contemporary expressive cultures, specifically addressing how stereotypes of wildness—or hegemonic conceptions of “otherness”—manifest on the ground within the communities who bear the stigma of such entrenched histories of exoticism. This ethnographic project focuses on music as a medium for challenging and reinforcing ideologies of exoticism, demonstrating how insiders and outsiders in both cases draw upon indigenous musical tropes to express or subvert stereotypes of “wildness.” By analyzing how music energizes social and political agendas for borderland groups such as the Hutsuls and Crimean Tatars, this project emphasizes the co-presence of alternate subalterities within the nation-state, demonstrating the degrees to which a post-socialist, diverse and fractured state such as Ukraine is constructed through imaginings of its internal, peripheral Others.
Miscellany by Maria Sonevytsky
It’s the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during which time the traditional co... more It’s the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during which time the traditional communities of that part of Ukraine have been dispersed, and their songs largely forgotten. Now, ethnography, musicology, and environmental activism come together in The Ensemble Hilka, a chorus that joins us to sing the lost songs of the so-called Chernobyl Zone.
I was interviewed for the Harriman Magazine by editor-in-chief Ronald Meyer in 2012.
Papers by Maria Sonevytsky
Бюлетень 53-54, 2022
Essay commission for the San Francisco Opera's 2021 staging of Eugene Onegin; republished with pe... more Essay commission for the San Francisco Opera's 2021 staging of Eugene Onegin; republished with permission in the Jan 2022 Shevchenko Scientific Society Bulletin
Topos, 2022
This brief essay reflects on the ontological question “What is Ukraine?” and pursues the urgent q... more This brief essay reflects on the ontological question “What is Ukraine?” and pursues the urgent question that follows: “…and who should define its past, present, and future?” The author develops the idea of “epistemic imperialism” to name the asymmetrical structures of global knowledge production, structures that have been revealing themselves since late February when the stakes of defining Ukraine have taken on profound urgency. The author reflects on her personal and scholarly relationships to the questions of epistemic authority and epistemic imperialism. Four additional questions are posed and evaluated: first, amid the unspeakable horrors of the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine: whose knowledge has mattered? Second, whose voices have been treated as credible and authoritative? Third, who has assumed they know what Ukraine is — or they do not need to know — before offering a diagnosis or prognosis? And fourth, how might those of us with relative power inside of the Anglophone academy think about the politics of redistribution from within the prestige economies in which we operate?
Ethnomusicology, 2022
In the Soviet Union, logics of evolutionism undergirded the Communist party-state's intervent... more In the Soviet Union, logics of evolutionism undergirded the Communist party-state's interventions into many aspects of Soviet life, including the realm of “folk music.” In this article, I draw on the example of the Soviet institutionalization of a Crimean Tatar folk orchestra to demonstrate how Soviet musical evolutionism ordered and constrained vernacular musical practices in ways that have had long-term political consequences, especially concerning the politics of post-Soviet indigeneity. I argue that to delink teleology from musical evolution—akin to how evolution is understood in the physical sciences—would take a fundamental step toward decolonizing music studies. I conclude by comparing the Soviet case to contemporary discourses of musical evolutionism, observing how it risks exiling some musics to a present that is “less evolved.” Crimean Tatar language, translated by Adel Khairutdinova, Muslim Umerov, and Ayla Bakkalli
Music & Politics, 2019
This essay offers a "soundbite ethnography" of a few key moments from the Women's March on Washin... more This essay offers a "soundbite ethnography" of a few key moments from the Women's March on Washington. Attending to moments of acoustic rupture, density, and disorientation, Sonevytsky applies Rancière's concept of dissensus and Mouffe's notion of agonistic democracy to assess potent moments of sonic micro-occupation as they occurred throughout the day. The essay concludes with a meditation on visceral knowledge and the potential of sonic ethnography in a time of societal upheaval.
Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (ed. Gavin Williams), Oxford University Press, 2018
Sonevytsky’s chapter considers the noteworthy lack of historical sources pertaining to Crimean Ta... more Sonevytsky’s chapter considers the noteworthy lack of historical sources pertaining to Crimean Tatar experiences of the War. It attempts, through analysis of what remains in sonic form, to recover experiences that have largely disappeared from cultural archives through a method of “overhearing” Crimean Tatars in outsider accounts. The chapter examines one British account of the Crimean War, and one Crimean Tatar “émigré song” anthologized by Soviet ethnographers. A closing section discusses Russia’s present-day annexation of Crimea and contemporary efforts to use musical memory as a means of political resilience.
Public Culture, 2019
This article investigates how sovereignty works in practice by attending to the aural public sphe... more This article investigates how sovereignty works in practice by attending to the aural public sphere of Crimea, as “Eastern music” is produced and circulated by the Crimean Tatar radio and as it penetrates the public spaces of microtransit. I argue that through the dissemination of “Eastern music” on the Crimean peninsula, Radio Meydan generated a new virtual space in which latent competing liminal sovereign imaginaries of Crimea, situated within the upheavals of Ukrainian instability and Russian aggression, were produced and negotiated. Through attention to the aural sphere—to the sounds that ears identify as symbolically resonant; to music, media, and the discourse that surrounds it—I argue for new ways of apprehending how sovereignty-in-practice insinuates itself into daily life and feeds the imaginaries that shape future political conditions.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016
This article considers the widely circulated video of a musical performance that took place durin... more This article considers the widely circulated video of a musical performance that took place during the social unrest that occurred in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2013-14 known as the “Maidan.” The edited video features the live performance of the piece “Hannusya” by the Ukrainian “freak cabaret” act known as the Dakh Daughters, a Kyiv-based collective of female actors and musicians known for their dramatic, collage-based musical performance pieces.. Their performance links Ukrainian nationalism, femininity, indigeneity, and Soviet anti-fascist propaganda through a surprising juxtaposition of polysemic elements. I consider how different publics read vastly different meanings into the Dakh Daughters’ video, as, alternately, a fascist call-to-arms, an ironic subversion of Russian propaganda, or a new form of progressive politics articulated as aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Secondly, I assess the shift in aesthetic values that has occurred among urban cosmopolitan musicians such as the Dakh Daughters as social unrest, revolution and war has forced the ethical implications of their aesthetic projects to the forefront. Ultimately, this has redirected aesthetic projects rooted in pastiche toward a politicized notion of ambivalence.
The 1986 nuclear accident at reactor number 4 of Ukraine’s Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Pl... more The 1986 nuclear accident at reactor number 4 of Ukraine’s Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Plant prompted the rise of an “eco-nationalism” that contributed significantly to the Ukrainian national independence movement of the late 1980s. It also resulted in the resettlement of over 200,000 Ukrainians from a zone known by ethnographers to have preserved a rich village culture of traditional folksong and ritual. This article examines the rise of the avtentyka
musical movement, which paid close attention to regional and local village styles of musical performance, in relation to the growth of movements of national identity, political sovereignty, environmental awareness, and the neo-traditionalist “Native Faith” religious movement in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Taking cues from Russian historian Dmitry Likhachev’s notion of an “ecology of culture”—influential among practitioners of avtentyka themselves—and from American ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon’s (2009) proposal for an “ecology of music,” we look at how variable notions of culture and nature played into the dynamic relations among music, identity, politics, and ecology in a context of rapid cultural and environmental change.
World of music, 2008
Musical instruments, the musician’s extra-corporeal “voice” that produces sound in time, mediate ... more Musical instruments, the musician’s extra-corporeal “voice” that produces sound in time, mediate the act of sound-making between the musician and the music and therefore constitute a unique category of “things” to subject to the question: how does an inanimate object express its “social life”? Through their morphological, metaphorical, and historical contexts, musical instruments index a variety of socially prescribed attributes. This paper tells the story of the accordion’s entanglement with “ethnic whiteness,” a stereotype closely aligned with the well-publicized biography of Lawrence Welk. The paper advocates for a new critical organological approach that seriously considers the musical instrument as an actor in the making of musical meaning. This approach is applied to two contemporary New York City-based accordionists who respond to the stereotype of “ethnic whiteness” through their musical performances and compositions, Guy Klucevsek and Rachelle Garniez.
The Harriman Review, Mar 2010
Released on Smithsonian Folkways in April 2015.
Triple Canopy, issue no. 4. Also published in Polish translation in Pressje (2009)., 2008
This was a collaboration with photographer Alison Cartwright. First published on "Triple Canopy" ... more This was a collaboration with photographer Alison Cartwright. First published on "Triple Canopy" (2008) and "Pressje" (Poland, 2009). Presented as a multi-media museum exhibition at the Ukrainian Museum in New York (2010), the Honchar Museum in Kyiv (2011), and returned to the Ukrainian Museum in New York (2014).
This dissertation presents case studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups: the Crimean ... more This dissertation presents case studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups: the Crimean Tatars of Crimea, and the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains – two human collectivities that are both, today, Ukrainian by citizenship. Both of these groups also embody dominant stereotypes of otherness in Ukraine – Hutsuls as the ideal Herderian romantic folk, and Crimean Tatars as the menacing, mysterious, “oriental” other. This dissertation traces how historical stereotypes of both of these groups as “wild” have shaped and defined their contemporary expressive cultures, specifically addressing how stereotypes of wildness—or hegemonic conceptions of “otherness”—manifest on the ground within the communities who bear the stigma of such entrenched histories of exoticism. This ethnographic project focuses on music as a medium for challenging and reinforcing ideologies of exoticism, demonstrating how insiders and outsiders in both cases draw upon indigenous musical tropes to express or subvert stereotypes of “wildness.” By analyzing how music energizes social and political agendas for borderland groups such as the Hutsuls and Crimean Tatars, this project emphasizes the co-presence of alternate subalterities within the nation-state, demonstrating the degrees to which a post-socialist, diverse and fractured state such as Ukraine is constructed through imaginings of its internal, peripheral Others.
It’s the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during which time the traditional co... more It’s the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during which time the traditional communities of that part of Ukraine have been dispersed, and their songs largely forgotten. Now, ethnography, musicology, and environmental activism come together in The Ensemble Hilka, a chorus that joins us to sing the lost songs of the so-called Chernobyl Zone.
I was interviewed for the Harriman Magazine by editor-in-chief Ronald Meyer in 2012.
What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the... more What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible - or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.
Music and Politics, 2019
Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Mar... more Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Maria Sonevytsky, Shayna Silverstein, Benjamin Harbert, and Noriko Manabe. I contributed the paper, "The Sounds of Post-Inauguration Protests: Memory, Circulation, Innovation."
Routledge, Sep 25, 2015
Targeted protein degradation (TPD) has recently emerged as a powerful approach for removing (rath... more Targeted protein degradation (TPD) has recently emerged as a powerful approach for removing (rather than inhibiting) proteins implicated in diseases. A key step in 1. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.
Wild Music: Ideologies of Exoticism in Two Ukrainian Borderlands
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016
In the winter of 2013, as dramatic political demonstrations overtook central Kyiv, Ukraine, scree... more In the winter of 2013, as dramatic political demonstrations overtook central Kyiv, Ukraine, screens around the world projected live video feeds of the protests first referred to as "Euromaidan," and later simply as "Maidan." 1 Social media was pivotal in inciting the groundswell of opposition that eventually led to the abdication of power by President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled for safe harbor to Russia after ordering government troops to open fire on citizen protestors. Much like the 2011 "Arab Spring" (Hounshell), this Ukrainian revolution was live-tweeted, shared on Facebook, streamed on various media sites, and witnessed, often in real time, by a global community of interested watchers (Pinkham). Key moments, images, and sounds from the Maidan-violent clashes between protestors and police, public art installations, and musical performances on the stage erected in downtown Kyiv-became viral Internet phenomena. Videos of popular musical performances, in particular, became digitally remediated through acts of retitling, reposting, and editing. As part of the broad social contest over meaning that has characterized the Ukrainian Maidan and the ongoing war in Ukraine's eastern borderlands, online communities interpreted such music videos in dialectically opposing ways, engaging in bitter feuds over the meanings of politically charged tropes on the comment boards of websites and social media feeds, each side accusing the other of propagandizing on behalf of either Putin's Russia or the US and European Union. 2 This polarized battle over interpretation often mirrored the entrenched discourse over Ukraine's liminal geopolitical position: forever the quintessential borderland, buffering an expanding Europe from the Russian sphere of influence. This article considers one such contested performance that circulated in the form of an edited music video, the Euromaidan performance of the piece "Hannusya" by the Ukrainian "freak cabaret" act known as the Dakh Daughters, a Kyiv-based collective of female actors and musicians known for their dramatic, collage-based musical performance pieces. 3 Their
The World of Music, 2008
Musical instruments, the musician's extra-corporeal "voice" that produces sound in ... more Musical instruments, the musician's extra-corporeal "voice" that produces sound in time, mediate the act of sound-making between the musician and the music and therefore constitute a unique category of "things" to subject to the question: how does an inanimate object express its "social life"? Through their morphological, metaphorical, and historical contexts, musical instruments index a variety of socially prescribed attributes. This paper tells the story of the accordion's entanglement with "ethnic whiteness, " a stereotype closely aligned with the well-publicized biography of Lawrence Welk. The paper advocates for a new critical organological approach that seriously considers the musical instrument as an actor in the making of musical meaning. This approach is applied to two contemporary New York City-based accordionists who respond to the stereotype of "ethnic whiteness" through their musical performances and compositions, Guy Klucevsek and Rachelle Garniez.