Mid-Century Nonconformists | Muzyka 2026
Date and time:
Tuesday 9 June, 2026
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
This class introduces and examines the leading Ukrainian composers from the generation of the sixties—the Shistdesiatniki—among them such figures from the Kyiv avant-garde as Valentyn Sylvestrov, Leonid Hrabovsky, and Volodomy Zahortsev, as well as Myroslav Skoryk and Yevhen Stankovych. We will look at the transformational role these creators and their music played in contesting socialist realism and its Russo-Soviet conceptions of both form and content. Concentrating on compositions such as Sylvestrov’s Symphony no. 3, ‘Eschatophony’, and Misteriya, Hrabovsky’s Concerto Misterioso, as well as Skoryk’s soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965), we will consider the intersections of this music with film, the visual arts, literature, and folklore. Broader themes include avant-gardeness and Ukrainianness, resistance and self-definition, identity and belonging.
See all eight Muzyka seminars here.
£35 general £25 student Friends and Benefactors of the Institute are also eligible for a discount.
Lecturer
Peter J. Schmelz
Peter J Schmelz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Batimore, USA), specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century musics. His books include Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford, 2009); Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (Oxford, 2019); and Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR (Oxford, 2021). His work has received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, two ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards, and the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society. He has also received fellowships from the NEH, the American Academy in Berlin, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Fulbright Program (Georgia).
