In the Winter and Spring of this year, I was teaching two overlapping classes: “Survey of World Music” at Westmont College, and “Introduction to Music Studies: Music and Society” at UCSB. Then the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, and despite the analysis by Kurzgesagt Labs that war at a national scale is no longer in fashion, this one seems full-blown, atrocious, and persistent. In response, I developed some lectures and projects for my courses that considered the intersections of music and culture to contextualize the current conflict. In my deep dive of Ukrainian history and music – which included some fascinating topics such as guilds of blind bandura and lira players (kozbars and lirnyks); nationalistic-minded, bourgeois folklorists such as Mykola Lysenko and their cultural agendas; Soviet power struggles over the arts and their own cultural agendas; and Project Polyphony’s contemporary recording of polyphonic singing (gurtoyoe penie) – the most wonderful thing to come out of it all was the band DakhaBrakha.
DakhaBrakha means “give and take” and is a musical quartet featuring Marko Halanevych, Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska. According to their website, the group seeks to create “a trans-national sound rooted in Ukrainian culture,” expressing a musical and performative character that is at once theatrical, eclectic, and powerful. They see themselves as cultural ambassadors, both for the international community, as well as fellow Ukrainians who continue to search for a unifying national identity. They call their musical genre “ethnic-chaos,” a perfectly apt name, given the melange of instruments and uncompromising hybridity of their pieces. The backbone of their instrumental sound consists of a cello (played by Nina in a unique tuning and originally bought at an antique shop) and drums (played by Olena). Vocally they typically contrast the voice of Marko (which runs the gamut from gravelly throat singing to Bobby McFerrin-esque falsetto) with the core three-part gurtoyne penie polyphony of Iryna, Olena, and Nina (all three have backgrounds in ethnomusicology and have done field work). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each song is somehow its own entity. Here are a few that stand out to me.
Sho z-pod duba: This piece is a gem! Nina’s pizzicato cello groove is joined by Olena and Iryna on the drums and then Marko adds syncopated jabs on a saxophone (on album recording) or accordion (in live concert recordings). The music stops and Marko lets out sort of call to attention in scat: “Boppy boppy bibala doppy!” (It is this feature which has my kids requesting that we listen to the “Boppy boppy” song.) The groove continues, now with the three women singing the words to a folk song called “From Under the Oak”. It cryptically tells the story of Ivanko who leads his horse to water but cannot get it to drink. In frustration he beats the animal, only to have a Balaam’s donkey situation in which the horse pleads for mercy. As enigmatic as the words are, the overall vibe of the music is consistently upbeat, jaunty, and energetic, returning to the “Boppy boppy” exclamation and bursting with percussive riffs. Perhaps the horse knows better than Ivanko and has its own source of water and happiness?
Kolyskova: A lullaby called “Oh dear cat” opens this piece. The words have the quality of a folk riddle, casting images of a cat, a cradle, a child, the colors gold and white, and always the question of whether one “has enough”. The song is rendered simply and intimately. Recorded sounds of a crying infant are added to the mix, as well as a slowly rocking piano riff in the bass register before Marko sings English words in his falsetto range, weaving a tapestry of a silvery moon just out of reach and fragments of “there’s a time for everything” from Ecclesiastes. Nina’s cello enters with a melody while scintillating piano strikes echo from the upper register like nighttime stars. More lullaby lyrics arrive adorned in a different, more wide-ranging melody and sung with a slightly more urgent vocal quality. These lyrics, while still soothing, confess the care-giver’s fear, expressing the worry caused by caring for children in the midst of the precariousness of poverty. Seemingly out of nowhere another far-off voice begins, putting words to what had previously been an instrumental, pentatonic countermelody, but now energized with a bouncy vocal style that puts me in mind of Chinese folk song. All these elements weave in and out of each other, ending with the crying baby and solo lullaby.
Vanyusha: Beginning nightmarishly with an atmospheric combination of harshly whispered maledictions, a raw sustained synth tone reminiscent of a piercing headache, and menacing glissandi on the amplified cello, this piece eventually finds its feet with a rather urgent cello groove overlaid with a darabuka rhythm that sounds like a cantering horse. Iryna’s vocal line has a monotone or restrained quality, although the agitation begins to mount through a dramatic rendering of the words. The lyrics tell of a man named Vanyusha whose cruel mother wrote to him telling him that his wife Kateryna had wastefully squandered all of his possessions while he was away. He comes home and beheads her, only to realize that his mother had lied. He then beheads his mother. Following Iryna’s solo rendition, the ballad is repeated as the tempo increases, this time with Olena singing a strident countermelody and, eventually, Nina wailing a descant over the top. This brutal piece fades away into the same frightening mist with which it began.
Oy za lisochkom: “Behind the wood” starts in sepia as it were, the folksong sung a cappella as though recorded on the field in the early 1900s and played back on a crackling LP. An accordion with a tango-ish quality and drums establish the groove as two contrasting melodies — women with a poignantly soaring one, and Marko with a jumpy, declamatory one — take turns. The cello has a rhapsodic quality here, sustaining long notes and indulging in ornamentation, putting me in mind of Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh. The piece ends with a sudden spike of energy, the drums working double time, the accordion punching out tone clusters, and the cello going off the rails with sounds reminiscent of a chicken being plucked.
Last week Jess and I had the very great pleasure of hearing DakhaBrakha live in Sonoma. Already loving the music, it was incredibly powerful to see the performers in the flesh, to experience their impressive light and visual display, and to hear them speak about their belief in a free Ukraine. For an encore they played Baby, one of the all-time favorites of my son for its wicked harmonica sections. “Baby, show me your love…” Hopefully we can catch them again when they come back to the Bay Area next year.