Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Monday’s events featured a public talk by Dr. Kaley Mason, titled Food, Music, and Environmental Justice in South India. Kaley is Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis & Clark College. Prior to moving to Portland, Oregon, he was Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Labor of Music: South Indian Performers and Cultural Mobility (Oxford) and a co-editor for the forthcoming volume, Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (Duke). His previous research focused on the entrepreneurial, aesthetic, and socio-political work wedding music specialists perform in the diaspora. Mason also recently co-edited a special journal issue on generational friction in musical ethnography of South Asia. The presentation focused on the relationship between music and food in environmental justice movements in South India.  The first part of the lecture talked generally on the many ways in which music and food connect, overlap, and mutually reinforced a lot of social activities together. He showed us a list of these different gastro-musical intersection.

The second part drew on some examples on how musicians are mobilizing their art and craft to address food security issues and environmental justice in these times of climate crisis.

After the presentation, the audience talked more about the ways food and music connect including hospitality.

  In the evening, we had a film screening by Dr. Svanibor Pettan. He is professor and chair in ethnomusicology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His academic degrees are from the universities in Croatia, Slovenia, and the United States, while his fieldwork sites include former Yugoslav lands, Australia, Egypt, Norway, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and the USA. The prevalent themes in his publications are music, politics and war, minorities, multiculturalism, gender, and applied ethnomusicology. Among his recent publications are the documentary with study-guide Kosovo Through the Eyes of Local Romani (Gypsy) Musicians and three volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which he co-edited with Jeff Todd Titon. He showed us a film called Tidldibab: The Oldest Flute in Ancient Times and Today. It is about about the archaeological find (in Slovenia, 1995) featuring the 60,000-year-old (contested) Neanderthal flute and the role of a Macedonian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski in this story. Ljuben, who is the star of this documentary, passed away a couple of years ago. Ljuben and Dr. Svanibor Pettan were friends and collaborators. This film was made by Television Slovenia, the country’s national television station. Darja Korez Korencan wrote the script for the film, and Divja Baba (pseudonym) was the Director.        

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

To start off the series of events for the Songs and Stories of Migration and Encounter Colloquium, we had a concert at the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church in Whitney Pier. The concert featured on one of the world’s premier players of the bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp), Julian Kytasty. A singer, multi-instrumentalist and third-generation bandurist, he has performed and taught instrumental and choral music throughout the Americas and Europe. Born in Detroit, he has a BFA in Theory and Composition from Concordia University in Montreal. Mr. Kytasty is especially recognized for his expertise in epic songs and early bandura repertoire. As a performer, recording artist, composer, and band leader, he has redefined the possibilities of the bandura.

 

The concert was titled Immigrants, Exiles, and Cultural Missionaries: Bandura Music Outside Ukraine.

 

The bandura has been considered a national instrument in Ukraine. During the 20^th century, the instrument was carried around the world by bandurists caught up in multiple waves of emigration. Some left to find a new home and a better future; others fled Ukraine as political exiles and wartime refugees. For each of these immigrant groups the bandura was a marker of identity and a way of expressing their deepest feelings about the place they left behind, the circumstances under which they left it, and the place they came to. In between songs, Julian taught us about these different moments of people leaving Ukraine and creating new homes elsewhere, and about the songs and stories they created.

 

Julian started the concert by playing us some of traditional folk songs that would have been sung by blind singers in Ukraine, Kobzars. He told us about the history of these epic singers who sang stories of the people.

 

The concert programme focused primarily on the 20^th century bandura players who left Ukraine and continued their work elsewhere.  Julian taught us about the war in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution and how this caused many prominent bandurists to leave Ukraine. The next large wave of Ukrainian emigrants was after the Second World War. Julian told us about the particular difficulties Ukraine faced during this war, struggling against both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. We also learned about initiatives by 1960s Soviet Ukraine to get major cultural figures to return to Ukraine.

 

 

Throughout the concert, Julian performed songs by these emigré bandurists and described how they felt a deep sense of cultural mission: to preserve cultural content repressed in Soviet Ukraine, to continue developing the instrument in their new homelands, and to chronicle their own experience and that of their generation.

 

Julian ended the concert with bandura music that was very personal to him.  As a third-generation bandurist, Julian Kytasty has been part of this process of bringing the bandura from Ukraine to North America. He played some of the music that he inherited from his father, grandfather, and other members of his family. He also played some of his own creations, including a completely improvised piece dedicated to this day of our concert.

 

The Ukrainian songs and the sounds of the bandura reverberated beautifully throughout the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church. It was a pleasure to learn about the songs and stories of Julian’s family and other immigrant bandurists, the instrumental music they brought with them, and the new music they made for their instrument outside of Ukraine.