my new institutional terrain. Delia Casadei and Emily Zazulia quickly became friends who patiently endured me as I brought this book to completion. On walks along the shoreline, I benefited greatly from dialogues with Richard Taruskin. Over meals, I have gained from conversations with Daniel Fisher, Marika Kuzma, and Alexei Yurchak. Charles Briggs offered a crucial suggestion and then allowed me to run with it. My wonderful seminar of graduate students at Berkeley read the close-to-final version of the introduction and encouraged me to finally send it off.
Marla Zubel acquired this book for Wesleyan University Press; Suzanna Tamminen and Mary Garrett kindly shepherded it through to publication. I thank the editorial board of the Music/Culture series—Sherri Tucker, Jeremy Wallach, and Deborah Wong—for supporting this project from the outset. Sashko Danylenko generously agreed to conceive the art that decorates the cover of this book.
In ways big and small, many others have supported this project over the years. In particular, I acknowledge Alison Cartwright Ketz; Julian Kytasty; Ethel Raim and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance; Mariana Sadovska; Yuri Shevchuk; Marta Soniewicka; Genevieve Smith; Virlana Tkacz of the Yara Arts Group; Morgan Williams; Ihor Poshyvailo and the Honchar Musum in Kyiv; Hanya Krill and Maria Shust of the Ukrainian Museum in New York; and Alla Rachkov. Margo Brown and David Romtvedt offered me a blissful quasi-residency in Buffalo, Wyoming. And I wish to acknowledge the vast infrastructure of childcare that undergirds this work: I thank Sara Foglia, Annemieke de Wildt, Carol Murray and the wonderful teachers of the Abigail Lundquist Botstein Nursery School at Bard College, in addition to a number of incredible Bard students—especially Bernardo Caceres, Maddie Hopfield, Eleanor Robb, Izzy Spain, and Sienna Thompson—for allowing me the space and peace of mind to know that my children were in good hands whenever I retreated to my office to write.
Finally, high as the Chornohora mountains is my appreciation for my family. A network of guardian aunts supported me through various stages of fieldwork: Ira Lasowska in L’viv, my safe harbor in Ukraine; Marta Bilas in Austria, who, among other things, helped me buy the beat-up Mazda that became key to my fieldwork; and Natalia Sonevytsky, my inspiring strianka. My late father, Rostyslav Sonevytsky, diligently practiced the piano every morning before going to work. This model of creativity and discipline has informed my life as a musician and a scholar. Words fail to express my debt and gratitude to my mother, Chrystia Sonevytsky, whose kindness appears to be infinite. She set an example of how to balance career with family; I thank her for her sustaining love for me and my family. My children, Lesia and Artem, teach me every day about the wild possibilities of human connection. And Franz Nicolay—my first reader, my worthy adversary, my companion, and my love—thank you for accompanying me on this adventure.
NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLITERATION
This book contains translations and Romanizations from three different languages with complex and politicized relationships to orthography and transliteration. Where possible, I have included the original Cyrillic for readers familiar with that alphabet.
For Ukrainian, I generally follow the transliteration standards adopted in 1996 as the Ukrainian national system. I prefer to use the Ukrainian transliteration of places located in Ukraine, even when norms of transliteration into English favor the Russian transliteration. For example, I write Kyiv (from the Ukrainian Київ, rather than Kiev), Chornobyl (Чорнобиль, rather than Chernobyl), and L’viv (Львів, rather than Lvov). When Romanizing Russian, I use the ICAO system that was adopted in 2013, in part to minimize the use of diacritics in the text. I hold to these standards unless an individual or group represents their names or terms using different systems of transliteration. In such cases, I follow their lead.
The Crimean Tatar language presents some especially complex issues. Typically, in this book, I transliterate from the Cyrillic system that was adopted in the mid-twentieth century because the majority of texts I depended on were either produced during the Soviet period, or in post-Soviet publications that favored Cyrillic over Turkic (or Arabic) rendering of the language. However, I do occasionally transliterate terms to connote the specific sounds of Crimean Tatar that are difficult to convey with strict transliteration from Cyrillic, so instead of the term “Khaytarma,” (rendered in Cyrillic frequently as “Хайтарма”), I opt for the transliteration as “Qaytarma,” which indicates that the initial phoneme is a voiceless uvular stop. (In Cyrillic, this phoneme is better approximated with the combination of “К” followed by the hard sign from Russian, “ъ.”)
A final note: some activists have moved to refer to themselves as “Crimeans” (in Ukrainian: Кримці or Krymtsi; in Turkic: Qirimli or sometimes Kirimli) rather than “Crimean Tatars.” I have not observed these practices due to the fact that “Crimean Tatar” remains the dominant internationally recognized ethnonym for the group. For this reason, I also write “Crimea” instead of Krym or Qirim. That said, I acknowledge the importance of the campaign to jettison the vague and colonial term “Tatar,” which was applied as the generic term for all Muslim subjects living on the territory of the former Russian Empire.
The vast majority of the formal and informal interviews for this project were conducted in either Ukrainian or Russian and have been transcribed and translated on the basis of field recordings. When I have reconstructed dialogue from field notes, I do not represent speech in quotation marks, unless I jotted it into my fieldnotes with quotation marks. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.
I present the identities of my interlocutors in various ways. In some cases, with their permission, I include full names. In others, in cases of more sensitive information, I do my best to fully anonymize sources. When I write about well-known musicians and bands, I typically use the full names of individuals if there is other information presented that would make them identifiable. In the case of celebrities, since my access to such individuals was for the most part restricted to their publicly available speech, I use full names.
Wild Music
INTRODUCTION
On Wildness
Wildness cannot tell because it frames telling as another tool of colonial rule. Wildness cannot speak without producing both the colonial order that gives it meaning and the disruption of that order through temporal and spatial and bodily excess and eccentricity.
J. Jack Halberstam, Wildness, Loss, Death
An audience of thousands wave national flags in a riot of color. Onstage, four dancers stand in a circle of red, pulsating light. The arena resounds with the sampled blare of the trembita, the massive slender horn associated with the Western Ukrainian mountain highlanders known as Hutsuls. Each dancer slowly raises a trembita so that the horns radiate outward from the circle. As the blurting opening sounds of the horns become more recognizable as melodies, they are interrupted by an orchestral hit, and a pop star—Ruslana, wearing a long fur draped Tarzan-like over one shoulder—enters from the back of the stage. She and five dancers wearing identical fur cloaks storm toward the audience. With each thunderous orchestral hit, they roar “Hey!” Bursts of flame erupt on the projection screens encircling the stage, as the dancers flank Ruslana in pyramid formation. They rip off their furs to reveal skin: tan midriffs, leather microskirts, and tall heeled boots with metal-studded seams. Their muscular tattooed arms bear Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” insignia. As they turn, the tinny sound of tsymbaly—the hammered dulcimer also prevalent in rustic Hutsul music—momentarily cuts through the thumping electronic tune, and the dancers jump into synchronized choreography that recalls mid-1990s Janet Jackson more than Western Ukrainian village dance. The observer confronts a rapid stream of ambiguous yet redolent gestures: flashes of Xena the Warrior Princess or Britney Spears, Scythian gold or Celtic crests, the amped-up oom-tzah of a discotheque, an echoing Carpathian yodel, global sex, local folk, Amazons, Genghis Khan.
