to investigate imaginative aesthetic practices engendered in globally interlinked processes and technologies of protest and uprising while steering clear of the traps of thinking music, mobility, social media, and politics through the frame of only utopic promise (with ‘democracy’ and ‘aesthetics’ particularly vulnerable in this respect)” (2016, 69). What Gray identifies as these “traps of thinking” in contemporary popular music extend, as I see it, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologies of Western art music centered on the belief that (elite) music could suspend rationality, transcend the base and worldly constraints of human existence, and universally ennoble all human subjects (see Taylor 2007 for a critique of this narrative). Vladimir Lenin, in fact, reportedly stated that listening to classical music “affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell” (quoted in Nelson 2004, 1). Despite this, portraits of a brooding Lenin listening intently to Beethoven’s “Appasionata” sonata “hung in almost every Soviet music school and conservatory” (Levin 2002, 195; see also Skinner 2003). All of this to say: such utopian ideas about music are potent and entrenched.
But, as ethnomusicologists have long argued, imaginaries of musical transcendence are, at root, ideological. They fail to account for the varied cross-cultural strategic and quotidian uses of music: to make a livelihood, to facilitate or accompany rituals, or to act as a lubricant that enables specific kinds of socio-musical participation (see, for example, Turino 2008; DeNora 2000). Such ideologies also fail to account for the unstable significations of musical sounds, those obscured by persistent assertions of the universal “language of music,” despite decades of anthropological studies of music that undermine this reductive formulation.16 Ethnomusicological studies since the 1980s, instead, have asserted the deeply contextual meanings of musical sound, advocating for understandings of how music not only reflects but also produces meaning in society. I reiterate these disciplinary truisms in part to warn against overemphasizing the curative potentiality of musical aesthetics, and also to underscore the potency of the ideological apparatus that supports notions of aesthetic autonomy, of music as a sphere apart from the debased world of politics.
I also wish to note the irony of claiming that the Wildness of etno-muzyka has the potential to project futurity in the context of a post-Soviet state, with its legacy of Soviet cultural policies that mandated that music must always speak for the (glorious proletarian dictatorship of the) future. Lenin’s famous dictum that artworks should be “deeply implanted in the very thick of the laboring masses” (Nelson 2004, 220), in tandem with the socialist realist aesthetic norms codified under Stalin, demanded that Soviet artworks take inspiration from peasant and working class “folk” forms to generate the music of the socialist future. What is clearly different in this twenty-first-century scenario is that Ukrainians making etno-muzyka today conjure sovereign imaginaries without an ideological imperative from above (even if, as some of my examples show, some of the techniques by which sounds are utilized for political ends are similar to those used in the Soviet period).
Contemporary musical practices of etno-muzyka have afforded Ukrainians the opportunity to at once re-litigate the past while still projecting creative future paths forward. In the decade framed by two revolutions, sovereign imaginaries morph and multiply. In their Wildness, the inflamed rhetorics of post-Soviet ethno-nationalism splinter and enable new ideologies of affiliation, such as the pragmatic patriotism that has been most vocally supported by the small but growing middle and creative class of urban and cosmopolitan Ukrainians. For example, by the end of the revolutionary decade circumscribed in this book, a sovereign imaginary exists that centers on the ambiguous but powerful trope of “dignity” that became key to the rhetoric of the Maidan Revolution, also known as the “Revolution of Dignity.”
What dignity means, and how it maps onto the idealized liberal transcendental subject of European history, remains hotly disputed within Ukraine. But what is striking is that such a sovereign imaginary is not predicated on any of the traditional ideas associated with nationhood, such as ethnolinguistic unity, common culture, or shared history. Rather, it is premised on the inclusion of citizens deserving of dignity, who happen to be contained within the somewhat arbitrary sovereign borders of contemporary Ukraine. In this case, instead of exclusionary nationalist ideas of who deserves dignity and sovereign protection, Ukrainians are developing imaginative strategies through which affective ties can be generated across class, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gendered experience. What interests me is how such sovereign imaginaries are articulated through musical expressions of Wildness. This becomes apparent in the following example, when Ukrainian citizens at risk of losing their citizenship voiced emergent solidarities by wilding the national anthem.
WILDING THE ANTHEM
In 2014, in the destabilizing aftermath of the Maidan Revolution, I witnessed a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem—which bears the rather uninspiring (and, in 2014, dispiritingly apropos) title “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet”—where the communal embrace of discursive and relational Wildness enabled this most staid of song forms to resound with fresh political possibilities.
That summer, my husband, infant daughter, and I attended the ArtPóle (АртПоле) festival in a tiny Western Ukrainian village located approximately sixty battered kilometers from the nearest city of Ivano-Frankivsk. ArtPóle was held on the territory of a decommissioned Soviet kolkhoz (collective farm) turned festival space, picturesquely situated above the shore of the Dniester River, about a fifteen-minute walk from the small cluster of rural homesteads that comprised the center of the village. On festival weekends, Unizh, population 156, swelled to the low thousands. The festival ran for five days in July and featured musical groups from Finland, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Russia, Poland, and the UK, as well as Ukrainian acts from Kyiv, L’viv, and Crimea. Theatrical presentations, film screenings, children’s programs, and master classes filled out the schedule. That summer, the Ukrainian “land art” summer festival was in its twelfth and, unbeknownst to the organizers, last iteration. The ambiance that summer was noticeably subdued, with much smaller crowds than previous ArtPóle festivals that I had attended. When I inquired in casual conversation as to this apparent shift in mood, one of the organizers told me that this muted atmosphere was by design. In a year when, as she put it, “the entirety of Ukraine is depressed by the political situation,” it had felt wrong to stage the usual exuberant, large-scale event.17 In this context, the intermittent rain, which disrupted programming and further dampened the mood of organizers and attendees throughout the week, seemed especially fitting.
The previous year in Ukraine had been especially chaotic: the boisterous Maidan Revolution spilled over from the winter of 2013 into 2014 and turned violent, culminating in the murder of over one hundred protestors in central Kyiv by state forces and the abdication of the democratically elected president, a corrupt figure heavily indebted to the Russian government. The Russian mediasphere decried the uprising as a fascist takeover of the Ukrainian government, while most US and European media outlets breathlessly reported on the Ukrainian citizenry’s “revolution of dignity” (революція гідності).18 The spring brought the loss of Ukrainian territory to the Russian Federation: first, with the swift an nexation of the Crimean peninsula, and later, through Russian-backed separatist violence in the eastern border regions (the violent conflict there remains ongoing in 2019).19 The rapid deterioration of the political situation—from the euphoric highs of revolutionary possibility to the miserable lows of wartime—reverberated across all corners of Ukrainian society: the state was exposed as vulnerable, its sovereign borders indefensible against Russian aggression, its military embarrassingly under-equipped and understaffed. In Simferopol, Crimea, a Crimean Tatar friend—one of the Sunni Muslim Indigenous minority of the peninsula who were generally pro-Ukrainian—told me, “We understand now just how powerless we really are … and how vulnerable all of Ukraine is. We are abandoned by our state, and our state is abandoned by our world” (personal communication, June 14, 2015).
By the summer of 2014, the illegal annexation of Crimea appeared entrenched, at the
