Interview with Ukrainian Artist Mariana Sadovska

Mariana Sadovska Photo by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko
Mariana Sadovska Photo by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko

 

Ukrainian singer, actress and composer has developed a hybrid music style that combines traditional folk music and avant-garde sounds. She is scheduled to perform at world music showcase globalFEST 2016 on on Sunday, January 17, 2016 in New York City. She discussed her career and upcoming concert with World Music Central in November 2015.

Angel Romero – Can you tell us about the band you will be taking to globalFEST 2016?

I will be coming with my newest project Vesna, duo with Christian Thomé, multi-instrumentalist and composer from Cologne, Germany. Last year we have being performing in Albuquerque during Revolution International Theater Festival and in Joe`s Pub in New York and we are looking very much forward to meet with an American audience again.

AR – Many influential North American arts presenters will be at globalFEST 2016. What do you expect to get out of it?

Since 2000 I am performing and working in music and theater projects in USA. My every visit was full of amazing experience, inspiring meetings and collaborations with American artists, great exchange and challenge. I had an incredible chance to work with such artists as pianist from New York Anthony Coleman, legend of klezmer music Frank London, theater director from La Mama – Virlana Tkach, Kitka Vocal Ensemble from San Francisco, Pig Iron Theater from Philadelphia, and last but not least Kronos Quartet.

I always felt at home in New York. And I love the energy, openness and challenge, which this city and this country has to propose me every time. In other hand, through all my life I feel my small mission – to open the door to the world for the Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian music. So, of course, I am looking forward to move on. I wish to be heard by the arts presenters and producers and with their help and ideas to be able to share my music to the brother audience, to bring the voice of Ukraine to you.

 

Vesna: Mariana Sadovska and Christian Thomé - Photo by Meyer
Vesna: Mariana Sadovska and Christian Thomé – Photo by Meyer

 

AR – Can you give our readers a brief history of your band?

We started our project 2012 with an idea of combining ancient Ukrainian folk songs and contemporary electro-acoustic sounds, interweaving different cultures through poetry and melody. The premier of our first full concert program was at the well-known Stadtgarten Concert Hall in Cologne in June 2013. Just few weeks later we were invited to perform at Germany’s biggest folk, roots and world music festival “tff Rudolstadt”, where I received the RUTH World Music Award. Since that we have been performing in Ukraine, Germany, Poland, England and produced our CD “Vesna”, which we are bringing with us to the globalFEST!

AR – What do you consider as the essential elements of your music?

Once women from the village, from whom I learned a huge amount of my songs, have heard me singing life during a concert in Kyiv. I felt I am going through one of the most serious test, exam. After the concert they told me: “you change the songs a lot, but, you keep the soul.“ This is my answer. It is crucial for me to hear the heart-beating of the song. To try to understand, what this song want to tell us today? The time has changed, the sounds around us are changing, but what is still so important? So painful? What make us feel joy, what make us cry? What shall we remember? What shall we protect? How this ancient music should be sung / performed today?

For me it is even more interesting to discover all this together with somebody, who has no Ukrainian roots. Christian Thomé, my musician partner, while working, is searching for his own answers in his own way. He brings his own musical sensitivity, his own imagination. Because of this, I believe, we manage to find a very special meeting of old and new, we manage to cross many borders, between the cultures, between the styles. This is fascinating – to combine old and new stories, rhythms, East and West and – music instruments from the oldest one – drum till the newest – laptop!

 

 

AR – Who can you cite as your main musical influences?

I am often compared with and I love and admire the work of Diamanda Gallas, Laurie Anderson and Iva Bittová (even though, I discovered their music only after I heard a compare. If I will speak about all people, who inspire me – the list will be very long. Lately, big influence on my music research made vocal artists from England Jason Singh. I am singing ritual music, so I have to be conscious of emerge energy, which is coded inside this musical incantations. Last years during each concert I repeat the words of Leonard Bernstein “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

AR – The best known Ukrainian act in world music circles is Dakhabrakha, What Ukrainian traditions do you represent?

While working with Traditional music, I want to be brave and to risk, to be open and experiment, to provoke the tradition, to be in dialogue with it. Otherwise, tradition can became a cage. Somebody told, there is nothing more changing and moving as a tradition. I think, we can bring a life into it, only, if we will make it our own, if we let it go through our heart, musical fantasy and dreams. In my musical work I am looking very deep into the soul, heart of the song, trying to find a hidden there 1000 years ago treasure for to be able to bring it on today’s light. In today’s sounds possibility.

Somebody called me nationalist and cosmopolitan in one person. I am balancing between the words, between the east and west, between tradition and new music, between being at home and being in immigration, between being deeply rooted and very free… Maybe you can call it Neo-traditional Ukrainian music???

AR – Tell us about your first recordings and your musical evolution.

My first recording happened, actually, in New York. My very first impulse to perform was coming out a necessary to tell about all this women and men, which I met in Ukrainian villages, during my expeditions. To share all songs, stories, legend, anecdotes. How with your voice you may call the spring? How may you push the rain clouds away? What songs you should sing during the fertility rituals at 5am, while accompany the bride and the groom to their first night? How the small boy was transformed into the bird and so on, including my meeting with the shaman men in the Carpathian Mountains.

I grew up in the West of Ukraine with the thoughts that Soviet time destroyed completely this culture, everything ancient, and everything that we call Ukrainian tradition. It was forbidden to sing in Ukrainian or even to speak Ukrainian.

When I went to my expedition and discovered, that this older women and men managed to protect, to keep the old knowledge and rituals and that they seems have been waiting for somebody to come and to learn it from them. That is why I started my solo concerts, combining story-telling and singing. My real premier was in New York. After it I got amazing reviews in the New York Times and a proposal to record an album for Global Village label. My very first CD I called “Songs I learned in Ukraine“.

Right now, while searching for new and new possibilities of human voice, while working with different singers from different cultures and while including into my instruments i-pad and laptop, my biggest question still is – what is my dew as musician and as a human being. In our days, where my country is in war, protecting its independence, where many of my friends are involved as volunteers or as soldiers…what is my task as an artist and as a musician?

So I am singing benefit concert in the cities in Ukraine, which were occupied. Or which are just on the border of military operations. I am sharing my music and hope with people, who lived there, bringing humanitarian help to the refugees, working with the children, who experienced bombing and loss, while leading singing workshops.

Women in the North of Ukraine believed, that if we will not sing the spring, spring might not come. More and more I feel, that my responsibility is to sing the piece, to sing the love and to sing the Ukraine.

 

Live performance by Vesna: Mariana Sadovska and Christian Thomé - Photo by Oleksiy Khoroshko
Live performance by Vesna: Mariana Sadovska and Christian Thomé – Photo by Oleksiy Khoroshko

 

AR – What musical instruments do you use?

From the oldest one – drums, Jewish harp (which is one of the most beloved instrument in Carpathian Mountains). From the newest one – electronics, laptop and i-pad.

AR – If you could gather any musicians or musical groups to collaborate with, whom would that be?

It will be the biggest gathering of musicians from all possible countries and stylistic – Kronos Quartet, Jason Singh (UK), Outi Pulkinnen (Finland), Jonathan Hart Maquwaja (New York), Taras Kompaniczenko (Ukraine), grandmothers from Volnovacha (Ukraine, Donbas region), Nick Cave, Diamanda Gallas…. and the best will be, if Stravinsky may be reborn and compose for such an ensemble.

AR – Do you have any upcoming projects to share with us?

After performance on globalFEST I am looking forward to sing my composition “Chernobyl.The Harvest“, composed for the Kronos Quartet on Fev 4th in San Francisco. Later one, please come to Switzerland in the beginning of May 2016 for the Naturstimmen Festival, where traditional Yodel choirs will meet with the world music artists from around the world.

I love to joke, that I am pregnant now with my new solo project, and it will be born very soon.

Discography:

Songs I Learned in Ukraine (Global Village CD819, 2001)
Budemo wesnu spiwaty (SEIAK 001, 2001)
Borderland (2005)
The Rusalka Cycle by Kitka, composed by Mariana Sadovska (2007)
Singing through darkness, DVD with Kitka (2010)
Just not forever (NRW Records 2859681, 2011)
Might be (2012)
Vesna, with Christian Thomé (Flowfish Records ff0068, 2015)

websites:

www.marianasadovska.com
www.albakultur.de/marianasadovska.html

Author: Angel Romero

Angel Romero y Ruiz has dedicated his life to musical exploration. His efforts included the creation of two online portals, worldmusiccentral.org and musicasdelmundo.com. In addition, Angel is the co-founder of the Transglobal World Music Chart, a panel of world music DJs and writers that celebrates global sounds. Furthermore, he delved into the record business, producing world music studio albums and compilations. His works have appeared on Alula Records, Ellipsis Arts, Indígena Records and Music of the World.

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