Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 upended life in the country – forcing around eight million Ukrainians to become internally displaced while roughly the same number were compelled to leave the country in what is Europe’s largest and deadliest conflict since the end of World War II – an array of experimental musicians across a swathe of electronic and vocal genres have come together to raise funds, to call attention to Ukraine’s plight or to pay tribute to individual and collective acts of endurance.
Beyond the surge of compilation albums which sought to raise funds for Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, local labels like Standard Deviation and Muscut have continued to provide a publishing outlet for Ukrainian musicians; the composer and jazz vocalist Ganna who was raised between Ukraine and Germany returned to her roots on a trek through the Carpathian Mountains, enlisting village choirs as she reinterpreted traditional songs of farewell and departure, odes to motherhood and the female spirit plus Hutsul folk tunes some of which had found renewed vigour on social media following the invasion or the Euromaidan protests of almost a decade prior; and the electronic producer Heinali released Kyiv Eternal as his own personal tribute to the Ukrainian capital to mark the first anniversary of the invasion.
Recalling the perilous first few weeks of the war and naming several of his tracks after the streets and squares, neighbourhoods and botanical gardens of Kyiv where he managed to capture snatches of field recordings, Heinali said of his album:
After the Battle of Kyiv was over, many Kyivites noticed this strange feeling. It was as if the city was alive, breathing. We wanted to hug it, to protect every inch of it from harm. I didn’t know how to do it back then. It took time and distance to figure it out, but Kyiv Eternal is my hug.
As the war stretches now well into its third year with no sign of abating, the initial desire to transfix the past or recuperate what has been lost gives way to more sustained anger and scattered trauma. Heinali describes the impact of a Russian missile strike near his studio in Kyiv in vivid terms, writing that:
When a Russian missile struck the ground not far from my studio in Kyiv, I vividly remember how my body reacted to the explosion, milliseconds before my mind did. That traumatic explosion reduced my essence to a primal state. There existed nothing but dread – the kind that, in scripture, accompanies the appearance of angels announcing ‘Be not afraid’.
Searching for a musical parallel which might provide a sense of succour or even transcendence, Heinali offers a comparison with Hildegard von Bingen, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess who was a philosopher, a herbalist and a prolific composer of medieval plainsong while suffering from her early childhood with a series of painful visions, which she nevertheless believed to be of a spiritual or mystical nature and called umbra viventis lucis or the reflection of the living light.
Some modern scholars have suggested that her visions were probably caused by migraines with visual aura in the form of blurriness and zigzagged lines, blind spots and often excruciating flashes of light. Her compositions – which stretch from the seventy-seven liturgical songs of her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum to the Ordo Virtutum, which is recognised as the world’s oldest extant morality play – make use of melismas and vertiginous melodies which tear at the borders of Gregorian chant, the plainsong which by the ninth and tenth centuries had become native to Catholicism.
On the soaring new album Гільдеґарда which is ‘Hildegard’ in Ukrainian the electronic composer is joined by the vocalist Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko for two songs by the abbess and mystic, which were recorded at the former Cistercian abbey of Sylvanès in southern France with its newly appointed stained glass windows and wide Romanesque nave, which has endowed the abbey with a reputation for outstanding acoustics.
Heinali is clear that Гільдеґарда is not a historically informed performance but rather takes Hildegard’s music and persona as a starting point for an exploration of the duo’s own themes and resonances. While it furthers his practise of using modular synthesis to reimagine the field of early music, the singer Saienko draws instead from the Ukrainian folk tradition as she weaves her melodies and strikes her highs with a fierce note of defiance.
The opening piece ‘O Ignis Spiritus’ interprets a hymn to the Holy Spirit which the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies has described as less characteristic of Hildegard’s work (though no less poetic) owing to its:
taut themes and often sparse music [. . .] Besides the first and last two stanzas, whose dynamic images of fire, music, balm and gemstones are matched with the music’s only extensive melismas, it is a sparing and often abstract meditation on the Holy Spirit’s role in animating and then rescuing the human psyche.
Last year making use of the twelve-string knee harp and bass recorder, the medievalist Laura Cannell tackled the piece on The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined with her version calling to mind a festive carol or the opening bars of ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. Yet here Saienko and Heinali slow the composition right down and stretch it out as Heinali’s synthesizer pulses like a siren alarm, his drones occasionally redolent of the keening great Highland bagpipe or Andean flute music.
Saienko’s vocals meanwhile sound urgent, resolutely holding the foreground over Heinali’s increasingly ominous drones, stark and guttural as she sometimes approximates ululating or even yodelling with the odd shake or trill, yet always maintaining a clarity of tone even when she vocalises beyond the lyrics. Her voice sweeps across both transepts to fill the breadth of the abbey’s nave, before the second half of ‘O Ignis Spiritus’ swarms with the piercing tones and fabricated pan flutes of Heinali’s modular synthesis.
With the two long tracks filling up both sides of the record, ‘O Tu Suavissima Virga’ from a responsory which emphasises the radiance of the Virgin Mary opens with staticky percussion which momentarily traces the shape of a heartbeat before gathering pace and blurring into one steady drone. Singing in more of a murmur or whisper, Saienko’s vocal evokes Björk on the coyness of ‘You’ve Been Flirting Again’ or on Medúlla songs like ‘Öll Birtan’ and ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’, which is a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem. Shortly before the twelve-minute mark her voice becomes more forceful and insistent, with the last four-and-a-half minutes of ‘O Tu Suavissima Virga’ a light-bearing beam of synthesizer with a bit of fuzz around the edges.
Shaking off the past to exist in the moment, across nearly forty minutes of playtime on Гільдеґарда the duo harness liturgical refrains and folk airs to sound at times positively heroic, in a He-Man and his Power Sword kind of way even as they deftly reshape Hildegard’s plainsong through their bristling polyphonies. The digital version of the album features a bonus track entitled ‘Zelenaia Dubrovonka’ which means ‘The Green Oak Grove’. Echoing the lofty arcs of ‘O Ignis Spiritus’ with a more tribal or ritualistic pace and temperament, the piece is based on a Ukrainian folk song from the Polesia region with Saienko adapting the lyrics to reflect contemporary circumstances.
Elsewhere the record cover as painted by Maria Vasylenko shows a fountain or chalice and a dwelling being penetrated by a fireball or comet, reminiscent of the Adoration of the Magi fresco which Giotto painted on the wall on the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua while closer to home, the illustration conjures that selfsame missile which singed the street outside of Heinali’s studio in Kyiv.
