DakhaBrakha is the perfect band to make the view ring true that people around the world speak the same musical language. It steeps its songs in traditional Ukrainian folk music but spices them with ingredients from around the world, such as raga drones from India, metrical drumming from Japan, and languid blues from America. DakhaBrakha call its music “ethno-chaos” but what makes it captivating is not the chaos but the way the global sounds amplify the Ukrainian ones. The quartet has released six albums and played concerts across the globe since 2007. Everywhere DakhaBrakha has played, fans have rhapsodized about the joy and pathos in their music.
You may like the essay; you will probably like the music. The latter says something about the quality of the former.
It reminds me of this, which is Mongolian but also heavily influenced by American biker culture.
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The Ukrainian vocal harmonies at times remind me of Bulgarian choral music. BTW, my hometown had a fair number of Ukrainians. From work, I knew a couple from Ukraine who had gotten out during WW2, a result of having been sent to Germany for slave labor. In common with other Eastern European refugees I had known, they didn't want to talk about the old days back in Ukraine ( the Ukraine?).
So, the etymology of "Ukraine" is disputed (as, obviously, is the territory). The older form of the etymology is that it means 'borderlands,' and thus, 'the borderlands' ('the Ukraine') implies Russian ownership; it is their borderlands that are concerned.
Ukrainians prefer not to attach the definite article, as it leave the word free to be its own thing. They like to translate it as something like "homeland."
The Russians may really be right about the etymology; but that doesn't imply we should let the win the dispute over what to call the place. Liberty is the only defensible purpose of any government; a government bound to the service of another is just an abomination.
Via Kievan Rus', there is an argument to be made for Russian-Ukrainian ties. Most would say that Holodomor would trump that. A Ukrainian I met several years ago considered the 2 countries to be separate entities.
A deceased neighbor of mine here in TX, of Ukrainian surname and ancestry, told me that in the '20's USSR borders were still somewhat open. One or both of his parents left the US for the USSR in the '20's and then returned to the US -with no drama. He also said that some of his uncles in Ukraine probably lost their lives in WW2 fighting as partisans. (Interesting I knew Ukrainians both growing up in NE and here in TX.)
Our Wolf of BLACKFIVE is married to a Ukrainian woman. She is extremely nice. (At the wedding her mother came over to our table and asked, through a younger female translator, “Why is he called’Wolf’?” I said, “-That- is a question you should have asked before the wedding!”
Haha! That's a great story.
The article is quite interesting, both in subject matter and what it shows of the nature of researchers into things like ethnomusicography.
“I don’t like absolutists saying music is all universal or it’s all culturally relative,” Savage said. “I think about it as a continuum. ..."
This seems so painfully obvious to me, I'm a little dumbfounded at those who take strong positions at either end of that continuum. They're demonstrably wrong. But they're "experts". Take that as you will.
There also seems to be no effort to separate their personal preferences and attractions to music from their research, given their highly emotional speaking on the subject of their field research.
"Having assimilated a lot of the same research, Mehr..." (psychological researcher) "...doesn’t buy the theory that music evolved for social bonding.5 “Evolution doesn’t really care how bonded you are with your partners,” he told me."
This is nonsense. The *longest* maturation period of any species means support structures to ensure the ability to have your resources shared by offspring are *critical*. He's being too narrow in reducing it to "partners". It could be communities or clans but it's definitely something that we need to produce a successful number of offspring. Now he may be right that music serves that end or not, but the premise evolution doesn't care how bonded you are to your partner (or social group), in regards to humans, is moronic.
One thought that strikes me is that language is also very dependent on rhythms, tones, and inflections- some languages are even described as "sing-song". Perhaps music is an extension of what we needed to be linguistic at all, and humans being human, we extraoplate things necessary out into other realms according to our desires rather than our needs.
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