Early Ukrainian field recordings at the American Folklife Center (08/22/04)

Early Ukrainian field recordings at the American Folklife Center

by Anthony Potoczniak

WASHINGTON - Scholars and researchers interested in Ukrainian folk music will soon have access to a unique collection of recordings made by Ukrainian ethnologists and ethnographers in the early 20th century.

Thanks to a collaborative duplication project between the Rylskyi Institute of Art, Folklore and Ethnography (Kyiv) and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, folk music enthusiasts will be able to listen to rare field recordings at the Folklife Center's reading room located in Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. The Ukrainian cylinder collection features original archival materials loaned by the Rylskyi Institute to the Folklife Center for restoration and duplication.

The recordings from the cylinder collection are culturally and historically significant and indicative of the pre-eminent status Ukrainian folk music scholarship already enjoyed in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, which included the early adoption of the Edison phonograph in fieldwork practice, transcription and musical analysis.

Many of the songs in the AFC collection were recorded in the 1920s by Volodymyr Kharkiv during a decade-long systematic program to collect folk songs initiated by the Ethnographic Commission, a predecessor organization to the Rylskyi Institute. The collection also contains several earlier field recordings made by notable devotees of Ukrainian folklore: the poetess Lesia Ukrainka and her husband, internationally renowned ethnologist Klyment Kvitka.

The Ukrainian sound collection contains approximately 20 hours of recorded music that was salvaged carefully from 211 wax cylinders by sound engineer specialists at the Library of Congress. As part of the duplication process, the songs have been copied onto analog and digital formats guaranteeing their preservation for many generations. The original cylinders along with a set of restoration masters were sent back to the Rylskyi Institute. The collaborative project was funded in part by several private foundations including the Maria Yasinsky Murowany Foundation, the REX Foundation, the Soros Foundation and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

The Ukrainian collection exhibits a multitude of song traditions that once flourished in the Ukrainian countryside, as well as vocal and instrumental works that can still be heard today. Of particular note, there are a significant number of recordings by "kobzari" or bards (e.g., Nazar Poklad, Larion Honchar and others), who narrate historical events to the accompaniment of the lira (hurdy-gurdy) or the kobza (lute-type instrument) in the form of dumy or epic ballads.

These minstrels, like many of the ethnographers who recorded them, were repressed during the Stalinist purges in the 1930s that eventually led to the demise of this distinctly Ukrainian folk art form. The collection also contains several dozen unpublished musical transcriptions of dumy, psalmy, and holosinnia (keening songs) as well as photographs of instruments and folk musicians from the period.

An online finding aid describing the Rylskyi Institute Ukrainian Cylinder Collection will be made available on the American Folklife Center's website, http://www.loc.gov/folklife/. For more information about the collection readers may contact the Folklife Reference Staff at: [email protected].

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