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INTRODUCTION

On Wildness

Wildness cannot tell because it frames telling as another tool of colonial rule. Wildness cannot speak without producing both the colonial order that gives it meaning and the disruption of that order through temporal and spatial and bodily excess and eccentricity.

J. Jack Halberstam, Wildness, Loss, Death

An audience of thousands wave national flags in a riot of color. Onstage, four dancers stand in a circle of red, pulsating light. The arena resounds with the sampled blare of the trembita, the massive slender horn associated with the Western Ukrainian mountain highlanders known as Hutsuls. Each dancer slowly raises a trembita so that the horns radiate outward from the circle. As the blurting opening sounds of the horns become more recognizable as melodies, they are interrupted by an orchestral hit, and a pop star—Ruslana, wearing a long fur draped Tarzan-like over one shoulder—enters from the back of the stage. She and five dancers wearing identical fur cloaks storm toward the audience. With each thunderous orchestral hit, they roar “Hey!” Bursts of flame erupt on the projection screens encircling the stage, as the dancers flank Ruslana in pyramid formation. They rip off their furs to reveal skin: tan midriffs, leather microskirts, and tall heeled boots with metal-studded seams. Their muscular tattooed arms bear Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” insignia. As they turn, the tinny sound of tsymbaly—the hammered dulcimer also prevalent in rustic Hutsul music—momentarily cuts through the thumping electronic tune, and the dancers jump into synchronized choreography that recalls mid-1990s Janet Jackson more than Western Ukrainian village dance. The observer confronts a rapid stream of ambiguous yet redolent gestures: flashes of Xena the Warrior Princess or Britney Spears, Scythian gold or Celtic crests, the amped-up oom-tzah of a discotheque, an echoing Carpathian yodel, global sex, local folk, Amazons, Genghis Khan.

The performance of this song—called “Wild Dances”—took place in 2004 and signaled post-Soviet Ukraine’s emergence into the arena of international pop music. It was Ukraine’s second year participating in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the televised song competition that has for decades staged European harmony and discord through the extravagant battle of folk-pop singers representing their countries (Tragaki 2013; Raykoff 2007). While trembita and tsymbaly samples in “Wild Dances” sonically marked the song as having something to do with the Western Ukrainian borderlands, other features skewed toward the generic dance-pop conventions of the early twenty-first century. The song’s lyrics juxtaposed Hutsul vocables (shydy-rydi-da-na) with vague desires (“I want you to want me”) sung in both English and Ukrainian. When “Wild Dances” was televoted to Eurovision victory, fans and media interpreted the song and its performance as an allegory of Ukraine’s tortured post-Soviet geopolitical position. In interviews, and in her own (brief) political career following her Eurovision stardom, Ruslana herself supported such an interpretation, framing her victory as evidence that Ukraine was a European state that had finally left the orbit of Russian influence.¹ But if “Wild Dances” was a message about Europe-facing aspiration, why voice that message using a lexicon of exoticism?

There is more to this Eurovision story—about how the pop singer’s triumph was variously received within Ukraine with pride, with ambivalence, or with embarrassment—especially as Hutsuls were forced to have a “rueful” reckoning with entrenched stereotypes of their “wildness” that had suddenly become internationally visible (Herzfeld 2005). I will take up these themes later on in this book. But here I wish to emphasize this watershed moment in post-Soviet Ukrainian pop music as a prominent instantiation of what I call “wild music,” when tropes of exoticism are strategically integrated in musical performance in order to make political claims. Such wild music, I will argue, draws upon a discursive (uppercased) Wildness that has long defined Ukraine’s liminal position in the world.² “Wild Dances” is perhaps the neatest example of such a phenomenon—especially as the song migrated, later in 2004, from the Eurovision stage to that of the Orange Revolution. There, as Ruslana repeatedly performed her ballad of auto-exoticism, it became an emblem of revolutionary hope for a less precarious future. Almost a decade later, the Maidan Revolution set in motion another cycle of revolutionary hope, eventual disappointment, then fatigue. Ruslana and scores of other musicians again deployed their own forms of musical Wildness on the revolutionary stage, suggesting new ways forward for Ukraine, trying to push past the binary choice of alliance with Europe or Russia, liberal democracy or authoritarianism, capitalism or socialism. In each new context of revolution, musicians performed hope for the future of Ukraine through wild music.

FIGURE INTRO.1 Following the finals of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, Ruslana waves the Ukrainian flag at the Abdi Ipekci Arena in Istanbul, Turkey. Ukraine won the 49th Eurovision Song Contest with 280 points. AP Photo/Osman Orsal.

We can begin to understand the political utility of Wildness as a representational tool by observing its historical resonance in modern Ukraine. In a global context, Ukraine is not likely to leap to mind as an extreme space of otherness. The historian Larry Wolff, for example, documents how Ukraine (along with the rest of Eastern Europe) was “invented” during the Enlightenment as “an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization” (1994, 7). Indeed, for centuries, travelers, diplomats, and writers framed Ukraine as a space of liminality, tantalizingly close to the spaces of civilization. To Johann Gottfried Herder, the original theorist of musical nationalism, its inhabitants were the nearby “little wild peoples” (2011, 57) who—from their practices of sounding, and Herder’s practices of listening—inspired his rhapsodies about the essence of the national spirit expressed through folk music.³ For many nineteenth-century Polish and Austro-Hungarian ethnographers gazing eastward, Ukraine became a site of pilgrimage in pursuit of such völkisch authenticity. For such observers, Ukraine was a zone of un-civilization, one that they aspired to make intelligible through ethnographic inscription.⁴

Meanwhile, from the north, Catherinian narratives of imperial domination turned on the taming of the “wild field” (дикое поле) that flowed into the Crimean peninsula.⁵ From the Russian imperial perspective, Ukraine was frequently depicted as an eternal “little” (мала) province of Russia, its unruly younger sibling. Such metaphors of kinship that subordinated Ukraine to Russia flourished in the Soviet twentieth century and have been revived again in the twenty-first.

Ukraine has been, in other words, a quintessential borderland, a buffer, a threshold, the closest “elsewhere” to a European or Russian “here.” Its “wild” peoples and territories, observed by so many outsiders, have been tempered by its proximity to those “civilized” observers. Historically, then, Ukrainian Wildness has not been construed as the inscrutable Other of Orientalism, but instead as the proximate unruliness, the quaint immaturity, of the border. Like Orientalism, however, this discursive formation of Wildness is formed in “the ensemble of relationships between works, audiences and some particular aspects of the Orient [or the Wild that] … constitut[e] an analyzable formation” (Said 1979, 28).

Today, this discursive Wildness thrums through daily life not only as a current of history, but also as a pulse of the present. In a precarious Ukrainian state, Wildness manifests in everyday instabilities, in economic insecurity, in the untrustworthiness of authority, in the churning violence on the country’s borders, in the rise of restive militias, and—key to my project—in the creative expressive practices of citizens who survive and innovate under conditions of precarity. Wildness manifests in the political and aesthetic concepts, techniques, and shared assumptions through which Ukrainians contest their liminal position in contemporary global politics. Contemporary Ukrainian Wildness, then, can be understood as a “border epistemology” in Tlostanova and Mignolo’s terms: a response “to the violence of the imperial territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of modernity with its familiar defects, from forced universal salvation to taking difference to sameness, from subject-object split to naturalization of Western epistemic privilege” (2012, 7). Ukrainian Wildness, therefore, also anticipates new modes of governance; scholars such as Jack Halberstam have also turned to “thinking about ‘wildness’ as a space/name/critical term for what lies beyond current logics of rule” (2014, 138).⁶

In the twenty-first century, the discursive force of Wildness has been harnessed by many Ukrainian musicians who remediate burdensome histories of exoticism in order to foster unexpected citizenly solidarities across the fault lines of ethnic, linguistic, and religious identity. From their borderland vantage, Ukrainians use Wildness as a source of knowledge, which rankles binaries of nature and culture, undermines geopolitical taxonomies of “West” and “East,” and—instead—motivates strategies of self-representation that defiantly re-center local ways of knowing and sounding (cf. Ochoa Gautier 2016). Let me clarify here that I am aware of the dangers of reproducing damaging stereotypes of exoticism in my examination of Wildness. In my approach, I reject the notion of any a priori wildness (which might suggest an equivalence between the wild and an absolute or primordial state of nature), despite the fact that some Ukrainians hear such “real” wildness contained in specific acts of sounding. I am not interested in arbitrating the relative truth of such claims here, but rather in investigating how discursive Wildness has been circulated through aestheticized sonic expressive practices that enable contemporary actors to make a diversity of claims to political status.

This book asserts that Wildness structures much of how Ukrainians today envision their horizons of possibility, and that wild music is a key vector through which citizens debate what Ukraine has been, what it is today, and, even more urgently, what it ought to be. It considers the ways that wild music—and the potential of Wildness expressed in sound and performance—fosters affective alliances among the diverse citizens of an imperiled state. While Wildness suggests riotousness, the refusal to be rationalized, tamed, or domesticated, wild music should be understood as a container that traps Wildness, because the music I analyze is always recognizable as a rationalized form of sounding.⁷ In other words, musical form, along with its contexts of performance, circulation, and commercial exchange, naturalizes and domesticates those sounds that are construed to be “wild”—those ungovernable, uncategorizable, unexpected sounds of Ukraine’s internal others that become intelligible—and thus commodifiable—as “music” when framed by specific acts of performance, audition, or circulation.

As a sonic representational resource, Wildness is expressed musically in many different ways: as outward-facing strategic auto-exoticism (as in the Eurovision example given); as nested and internal otherness (witnessed in the urban fetish of “village authenticity”); as ecological activism, totemic “folklore,” anarchic hedonism; or as a reflection of Ukrainian experience that refracts the gazes of external viewers. It functions, at times, as a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1985), though it can be coopted by the powerful. The Wildness of wild music seeks to surprise, to call attention to itself—and, at times, to refuse. Wild music can present as campy ironic distance (wildness as “wildness”), as utter sincerity (wildness as “nature” or “pristine wilderness”), or as an ambiguous blur of these two extremes. In any of its guises, the Wildness of wild music is disruptive in the present. Wildness rattles the cage of musical culture; it seeks to unsettle conventional sense, even as it is framed within colonial and postcolonial logics of sense-making (cf. Taussig 1987). Still, Wildness affords new modes of expression that musicians artfully link to the ways of life that they seek to bring into being.

Wildness is also a matter of perception. Many listeners—especially those alienated by, excluded from, or not conversant in internal Ukrainian discourse—will not hear the same Wildness that I identify in this music. Musical sound is, perhaps, an inherently unstable index of cultural territory.⁸ But this book traverses the edges of this interpretive site, seeking a “border thinking”—and listening—grounded in culturally situated “interpretive moves” that center local ways of knowing through sound (Feld 1984).

SOVEREIGN IMAGINARIES

The period investigated in Wild Music is loosely bookended by monumental events—the two revolutions that coincided with Ukraine’s two most prominent spectacles of global pop visibility, its Eurovision Song Contest victories in 2004 and 2016—but I will also attend to the interstices of revolutionary crests and wartime troughs, when hopes for the future took creative form and gained momentum as emergent social imaginaries.⁹ To pursue such hopeful formations, I introduce the analytic of sovereign imaginaries: expressions of citizens’ desires for ways of life that are enabled by particular forms of governance. My notion of sovereign imaginaries is rooted in the anthropological argument that the form of hegemonic power known as sovereignty is constituted through sociocultural practices. By invoking the phrase “ways of life” (life in community according to social norms and practices), I follow Caroline Humphrey’s critique of Giorgio Agamben’s “somewhat pallid” understanding of ways of life as “merely the habitual activities of politically and judicially defined groups.” Humphrey points out that ways of life “have their histories and their modes of governmentality. They do not simply acquiesce to the menace of sovereignty but interpose a solid existence of their own that operates collaterally or against it” (2004, 420).¹⁰ This means that such ways of life—such practices of sovereignty—order how citizens conceive of themselves as subjects (personal sovereignty) who consciously attach to—while leaving space to contest and reimagine—the political sovereignty of the state. In this sense, political sovereignty can be rethought not just “as a set of political capacities but as a formation in society that engages with ways of life that have temporality and their own characteristic aesthetics” (421). What, then, can ways of life that are sensory, acoustic, musical—with their history, temporality, and “characteristic aesthetics”—tell us about emergent conditions of sovereignty?

Through musical ways of life, citizens negotiate histories of representation, transmuting Wildness from a diminishing term of otherness into a source of power. But these expressions of Wildness are not purely hopeful: they also bear the historical burdens of Ukrainian “backwardness,” and the contemporary fatigue and disappointment with the failures of postmillennial revolutions. The wild music I investigate throughout this book can be roughly classified using the capacious post-Soviet Ukrainian genre term etno-muzyka (ethno-music), which emplaces local sonic markers (etno-) within global popular music styles (rock, hip-hop, and so on).¹¹ The “wild” sounds of etno-muzyka—which typically index an internal Ukrainian etnos—forge solidarities through shared recognition.¹² Within the large and diverse space of the Ukrainian state, “wild” sounds take many forms—the trembita’s signal blurt, the sung cries of elderly babushkas, the modes and ornaments of traditional Crimean Tatar songs, and so on. These “wild” sounds often relate to each other in delicately negotiated patterns of nested otherness. Yet when the heavy, often painful histories of exoticism are refigured and redeemed, citizens bond themselves to each other and to the state in part through the webs of signification spawned through these sounds. Publics are formed through shared interpretations of sounds made meaningful through performance. I understand this process as a branch of sensory citizenship that I call “acoustic citizenship.”¹³ Acoustic citizenship, a term I will elaborate on at the end of this book, naturalizes forms of belonging within the space of the state through shared experiences of listening, sounding, or being listened to. This study therefore explores the various “audible entanglements” (Guilbault 2005) of music with the politics of citizenly attachment to the state, even when the state is weak, corrupt, and fractured.

The historical and present-day resonances of Wildness, and its representation in various forms of wild music, allow us to consider how Ukrainian musicians and audiences attempt to bring certain ways of life into being. Since these ways of life are mediated through the apparatus of the state, the Wildness of wild music opens the space to rethink sovereignty and citizenship. This is especially critical in a state as fragile as Ukraine, but the ramifications reach well beyond the case study at hand. Ukraine’s present geopolitical conundrum reveals the “fragility of state sovereignty” on a global scale (Wanner 2014, 430),¹⁴ even as far-right nationalist movements that are often predicated on maintaining the state’s unassailable sovereignty have risen to power around the world.

Arjun Appadurai memorably wrote that the nation and state are locked in “a battle of the imagination” (1990, 14). A sovereign imaginary, as I define it here, holds the potential for broadening this battlefield beyond the nation or state, toward emergent logics of rule. José Muñoz, following Ernst Bloch, might identify the sovereign imaginary as an “anticipatory affective structure” (2009, 3) in its ability to bring to light personal-political desires that are “not-yet conscious.” In Muñoz’s terms, it is a “concrete utopia,” one that may be “daydreamlike, but [represents] the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many” (3).¹⁵ How, for example, do “stateless people” such as the Kurds or Roma appeal to existing logics of the nationstate? How will the new diaspora of Syrian refugees conceive of themselves in the aftermath of the war that ravages Syrian territories? What is the obligation of a state to provide a minority or Indigenous population with the right of self-determination? Ten years after the global financial debt crisis, is the Greek state sovereign, or merely subject to the neoliberal policies of the European Union? The analytic of the sovereign imaginary allows us to observe how sovereignty might be concretely territorialized (that is, “the Palestinian state”), but it also permits the object of sovereignty to be a “hyperreal” abstraction (that is, the “West” or “Europe,” with its hegemonic connotations of order and civil society) (Chakrabarty 2000, 27). These imaginaries may privilege precolonial or nostalgic networks of belonging (Indigenous communities, former empires, diasporas) that can be nested within or stretch beyond a modern state’s borders. Sovereign imaginaries, then, often cull from different sorts of sovereignties, redirecting the disenchantments of the present toward the future. It is in their futurity, in fact, through which sovereign imaginaries develop the potential to collide with the potentiality of Wildness contained in wild music.

A note of caution: I do not mean to overstate the transformational potential or utopian promise of music with regard to emergent sovereignties. As Lila Ellen Gray has recently written, “For scholars of music, aesthetics, and politics in an era of social media and protest, one challenge is how 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 very least, as a “frozen conflict” (Dunn and Bobick 2014; see also Charron 2016). In the eastern borderlands, Russian-backed “separatists” had announced the secession of the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” from the Ukrainian state.²⁰ Russia welcomed these “new Russian” provinces into its orbit, depicting the separatists as heroic anti-fascist crusaders. Everyone I encountered that summer seemed preoccupied with the slow-boiling war at Ukraine’s borders. Even the youth-oriented music and culture festivals that had defined summer revelry in twenty-first-century Ukraine were not immune from the unfolding crisis.

At Artpóle in Unizh, the stated theme of the 2014 festival was “ornaments.” The press release—though ambiguous—lent itself to political interpretation:

Borders are lines. Lines delineate space. Lines connect points in space. Points and lines create ornamental patterns. Geometry borders on art. Your movement in space, a path, a line, is designated to imprint your movement (press release, 2014).

There was no question that Ukraine’s vulnerable borders motivated some of the programming for the festival, particularly on the festival’s Sunday evening program. The night was billed as an “Authentic Program” (Автентична Програма) featuring music from Crimea and the Carpathians, two borderland regions of Ukraine that loom prominently in Ukrainian imaginations of its internal Wildness. The evening featured back-to-back performances of two groups from these distinct regions. The first group were Hutsuls, the same population who inspired Ruslana’s “Wild Dances,” and who occupy the space of the Herderian ür-folk of Ukraine, with colorful traditional costumes, lively music, and a unique cosmology. The Hutsuls were followed by a trio of Crimean Tatar musicians, upon whom many ethnic Ukrainians and Russians project racialized Orientalist stereotypes (especially of a capacity for violence) due to their historical link to the Ottoman Empire and to the fact that they are neither Slavic nor Christian (with some few exceptions).²¹ The Crimean Tatar trio had traveled through the blockaded border to perform—illegally, in the eyes of the Russian state that now controlled the peninsula but had not yet forced them to surrender their Ukrainian passports.

By juxtaposing two “authentic” borderland musical traditions from extremely different parts of Ukraine with different present-day statuses vis-à-vis citizenship, the festival organizers asked the audience to engage with those performances as parts of one whole—a coherent Ukrainian state with its sovereignty intact—despite the bitter reality that this whole had been so recently broken. At 8:00 in the evening, the Hutsul collective (actually an amalgam of musicians from various Hutsul bands who performed under the name Hutsuls that night) began to play on one of the outdoor festival stages, a makeshift amphitheater fashioned out of the ruins of a building.²² Their up-tempo tunes, played on the iconic instruments of the Hutsuls—sopilka (wood flute), tsymbaly (hammered dulcimer), bubon (bass drum with attached cymbal)—resounded through the post-Soviet rubble. After about ten minutes, their set was interrupted by a pelting downpour. The festival organizers hurriedly steered both musicians and audience into one of the bunker-like “gallery” spaces. In the smaller space, the acoustic instruments boomed, electrifying the crowd, who danced energetically. As the musicians played the well-known Hutsul men’s circle dance called the “Arkan,” I was pulled into the dance with my daughter in my arms, as young and hip festivalgoers mingled with local villagers in a jubilant approximation of the acrobatic folk dance.

The downpour ended as abruptly as it began, and when the Hutsuls finished their set, the audience filtered back out into the now-muddy festival field. The crowd reconvened at the outdoor stage, where Taraf, the trio of Crimean Tatar musicians—a violinist, accordion player, and percussionist—were setting up for the second set of the avtentychna prohrama. As they began to play, it became clear that the crowd had retained their high-octane energy from the Hutsuls’ musty indoor set. Audience members scaled and then danced on the crumbling stone walls of the makeshift amphitheater as a bright moon shone in the night sky. After a medley of fiery qaytarma—the iconic 7/8 dance genre of the Crimean Tatars—the violinist spoke into his microphone: “Ukraine is united.” The crowd erupted in cheers. Deep in the set, the trio performed an arrangement of the faux-baroque composition known as “Albinoni’s Adagio.” I recognized the mournful tune from my fieldwork in Crimea in 2008–2009 as one of the melodies that Crimean Tatars have adopted to commemorate their traumatic twentieth-century deportation and exile under Soviet policy.²³ The Crimean Tatar trio then continued their set with a spirited instrumental performance of the Ukrainian national anthem.

The unusual choice to include the national anthem in such a festival performance, and then its creative rearticulation using Crimean Tatar musical gestures, reanimated “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet.” An archetypal “anthem-as-hymn” (Daughtry 2003, 45), the performance of the song that night was unusually intimate, stripped of its pomp and revitalized with wild feeling. Because the trio performed instrumentally, the audience supplied the lyrics, creating a shared energy between performers and the audience that encircled them, some singing from high atop the crumbling walls of the improvised amphitheater. The melody of the anthem was elaborated with Turkic ornaments from the violinist and supported by the tonally varied sounds of a doumbelek goblet drum. This uncharacteristic mix made the anthem feel less militaristic, more lush in its melody and contoured in its rhythms. Instead of standing solemn and still, audience members moved their bodies in time with this new anthem and used their voices to howl and cheer when it concluded. The performance and its reception dislodged the anthem from its typical nationalistic setting by channeling it through an improvisatory Wildness. This Wildness did not rest purely on the anthem’s “Crimean Tatar-ization” but arose relationally, in dialogue with the Hutsul group who had inspired the Crimean Tatars toward this improvisatory expression of solidarity, and with the festival audience who elevated the performance with their effervescent appreciation.

What I perceived as the relational impetus for this articulation of Wildness was clarified for me the next day, when I asked one of the Crimean Tatar instrumentalists of Taraf whether the Ukrainian national anthem was part of their standard repertoire. He replied that it was not. But, he explained, given the circumstances of the ongoing political instability, the spirited festival crowd, and after hearing the Hutsuls play, they wanted to reassert their claim as citizens of Ukraine and chose to enact that claim spontaneously, through musical means. This gesture of goodwill emerged in response to, but also in solidarity with, the performance of the Hutsuls. The Hutsuls made no overtly patriotic gestures; yet they spurred the Crimean Tatars to overt patriotism through a gesture of musical solidarity in a creative, collectively realized rearrangement of the national anthem.

FIGURE INTRO.2 The Hutsul collective soundchecks at the ArtPóle festival in Unizh, 2014. Photo by Maria Sonevytsky.

FIGURE INTRO.3 The Crimean Tatar group Taraf performs after the rainfall at ArtPóle in Unizh, 2014. Photo by Maria Sonevytsky.

On that Sunday night at ArtPóle, Ukrainians came together in a “spirit of conviviality” to make sense of a world that seemed to be falling apart. Paul Gilroy’s idea of convivial culture is helpful here to explain how I interpreted the evening—not, to borrow from Gilroy’s lexicon, as a triumph of tolerant multiculturalism, but as a solidarity borne from “radical openness” (2006, xv). This was a wild solidarity that promised new, yet unanticipated modes of affiliation and ways of being—of reimagining, in this case, what it is to be “Ukrainian” when the nation-state is no longer intact.²⁴ The ruins, a monument to Soviet communal agriculture, contributed to the wild possibilities of the night, calling to mind Ann Laura Stoler’s question about “how people live with and in ruins … to the politics animated, to the common sense they disturb, to the critiques condensed or disallowed, and to the social relations avidly coalesced or shattered around them” (2008, 196). Stoler asks that “we might turn to ruins as epicenters of renewed claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects” (232). The rain-soaked ArtPóle amphitheater did, in fact, become an epicenter for a renewed claim to—and an expression of the broad desire for—Ukrainian political sovereignty. In wilding the national anthem, the concert expressed the potentiality of emergent politics articulated within the fractured space of an imperiled state.²⁵ Pleasure, sociality, spontaneity, and the deus ex machina effect of a temperamental bout of weather merged to foster this kind of ecstatic space. Thus, the festival night resembled a “temporary autonomous zone” (Bey 1991 [1985]), with acts of symbolic remaking akin to what Alexei Yurchak (1999) identified in the fleeting utopian promise of post-Soviet raves.²⁶

In Unizh, the performance of the Ukrainian anthem gave voice to an emergent “intimate public” of festival participants (Berlant 2008; see also Shank 2014). Here, as festival attendees swayed and sang the words of the Ukrainian national anthem, the political became foregrounded and interwoven with the sociality and pleasure of the festivalgoing experience. As the seated attendees joined those standing to stomp their feet, clap, and hoot following the anthem, the performance achieved, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, “unisonance”—the selfless feeling of simultaneity and solidarity through which the “imagined community” of the nation is conjured (1991, 145). What interests me here, however, is how this unisonance was diverted from the idea of nationhood and toward an idea of statehood—of the integrity of sovereign borders and the power of the state to enact protections for the ways of life enclosed within those borders.

Since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has tried and failed to conform to European liberal democratic models that presume an isomorphism between nation and state. Begoña Aretxaga memorably dismantled logics of the nation-state by pointing out its “untenable hyphen” (2003, 396); Ukraine offers some proof of how ill-fitting that conjunction really is. A nation, at least in its idealized form, is generally defined through its shared history located on a distinct territory, with a common language and expressive culture. Ukraine confounds these criteria.²⁷ First, Ukraine was partitioned and re-partitioned among numerous imperial powers (including the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, if one advances the belief that the USSR operated in Ukraine as a quasi-imperial formation, the Soviet Union).²⁸ Second, language usage in Ukraine is a contentious subject since Ukraine functionally—though not legally—has two national languages, Russian and Ukrainian, and a widely utilized hybrid form of those two languages called surzhyk.²⁹ Third, Ukraine is and has always been multiethnic and multinational. Though its population is majority Slavic (including people and groups that may identify as ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, or Poles, or more localized forms of affiliation such as Hutsuls, Polissians, Rusyns, and others), it also has significant numbers of protected minority groups (Greeks, Armenians, Germans, Bulgarians). Then there are the Muslim-majority Crimean Tatars, whose post-Soviet struggle for human rights has largely been predicated on gaining recognition as “Indigenous people” (in Ukrainian, корінній народ; in Russian, коренной народ), a status mediated in large part through the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.³⁰ In the period of post-Soviet independence, and especially since the 2004 Orange Revolution, reductive yet tenacious narratives of a Ukraine split in two along an East-West axis have characterized media representations and many academic analyses of Ukraine (Portnov 2013, 242). As I write in 2019, Ukraine’s sovereign borders remain disputed.

In the performative wilding of the national anthem at ArtPóle, instrumentalists and audience members voiced a collective wish for a sovereign state that could protect its citizens across the lines of identity that were present in that moment. This suggests an awareness of power in “its capillary form of existence,” at “the point where [it] reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault 1980, 39). The metaphor of the capillary, however, also suggests circulation. This begs the question: How do individuals agentively tap into and instrumentalize this power as it trickles into their bodies, voices, actions, and attitudes? How do they redirect its flow, or allow it to pass through, in order to animate new ways of life? Giorgio Agamben (1998) critiques Foucault on similar ground in the opening pages of Homo Sacer.³¹ I propose that if we hear the Wildness in this national anthem as a collective and creative expression of a wish for sovereignty, then we also witness how “technologies of the self” link to the “political techniques of the state” through musical practices (cf. Agamben 1998, 5).

A core premise of this study is that citizens not only desire, but demand the state’s sovereign power. Even when its institutions are weak and corrupt, the state form endures as a modern “screen for political desire” (Aretxaga 2003, 394). Citizens dream of the sovereignties that would best suit the state they inhabit and attempt to bring such potentialities into being. This claim therefore positions this study in productive tension to the broad literature that documents how people have historically resisted, been silenced by, or refused the coercive forces of state power (Scott 2009; Mbembe 2003; Simpson 2014). But here, rather than document the violent and necropolitical effects of sovereign power, I center on the potential of the sovereign state to enact policies of care for its citizens, who, in Ukraine, creatively voice their wishes for such care through Wildness and its historically freighted, imaginative, and revolutionary potentials. The musical articulations of Wildness that interest me most circulate widely and destabilize entrenched nodes of power, elevating instead the peripheral and seemingly inconsequential ways of life that offer alternative models of citizenship and belonging.³²

Apprehending Wildness in this way, of course, presupposes that citizens can harbor sentiment for institutions, infrastructures, and bureaucracies—perhaps easier to imagine when we consider how the refusal of institutions and bureaucracies to succumb to the demands of powerful leaders can actually thwart or block corruption.³³ Beyond the state’s monopoly on violence, or the well-studied quasi-theological power its sovereign power exerts to discipline its polity and protect its borders (Schmitt 1985 [1935]), a state, of course, maintains its legitimacy by providing stable governance for its citizens. The often under-emphasized formulation of Max Weber’s idea of the modern “state as enterprise” is helpful here to understand how a modern state’s entrepreneurialism—its pursuit of certain strategies aimed at the betterment of the quality of life for its subjects—is key to maintaining the state’s legitimacy (Anter 2014, 206).³⁴ Put simply, the state is the guarantor of the ways of life desired by citizens, as well as the formulator of their desires. In 2018, we see such desires for renewed sovereignty articulated in care-giving terms both in global superpowers such as the United States (where attacks on “globalism” are core tenets of Trumpist populism) and in vulnerable states such as Ukraine (where these desires take various defensive forms).

An important distinction lies embedded in the chasm between the possibility that a state would act with care and compassion on behalf of a citizenry and the reality of the violent and exploitative mechanisms through which state power is typically consolidated (that is, the better-known components of Weberian state theory). I do not intend to paper over this reality, nor over the specific and egregious inadequacies of the modern Ukrainian state. In fact, since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian state has repeatedly proven its untrustworthiness, incompetence, and disregard for its non-elite subjects. In the post-Soviet period, with the influx of foreign aid and business, the growing population of migrants from Asia and Africa, and the rush of consumer items into a starved marketplace, a kleptocratic regime emerged along with stark socioeconomic inequalities that forced the vast majority of Ukrainians into conditions of poverty. The brutal conditions wrought by neoliberal capitalism might also explain why many Ukrainians today harbor nostalgia for aspects of Soviet life, or—in extreme cases such as those pro-Russian separatists in the eastern borderlands—desire Russian state power.³⁵ Ukraine’s political-oligarchic class has been compromised through the influence of both Russian and Western governmental entities. The state is deeply in debt to Russia and to the International Monetary Fund. Its bureaucracy is penetrated by corruption at all levels. The nascent middle class of urban Ukrainians, those who came of age in the late and post-Soviet eras, tend to have a profound mistrust of the state as it exists, but they also often harbor little nostalgia for the USSR, and nurse no delusions about the injustices and crises that face liberal democracies in Europe and North America. Many Ukrainians across socioeconomic categories suffer from revolutionary fatigue, having lived through many cycles of social collapse, revolutionary hope, and eventual disappointment.³⁶

It should also be noted that the Ukrainian state has recently sanctioned violence against its citizens. During the Maidan Revolution, for example, the government of then-President Yanukovych enlisted snipers to assassinate street protestors who are now memorialized as the “Heavenly Hundred” (Небесна Сотня). Further, Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik (2015) have argued that as war erupted in the eastern borderlands in the aftermath of the Maidan, the Ukrainian state prioritized the defense of its political sovereignty over protecting the citizens ensnared in a war zone. With respect to the post-Maidan political climate, they write,

This new precarity has been ideologically legitimized by a new rhetoric of Othering … which divide[s] the population into more valuable and less worth[y] groups on the basis of national consciousness. People from Donbas are constructed as “improper Ukrainians”: their so-called lack of national identity is associated today with the label of Soviet, as if this part of [the] population did not “grow up,” [was not] “developed,” “emancipated” from the Soviet past. They are contrasted with the apparently “nationally conscious” citizens of the other parts of Ukraine, whose national consciousness makes them valuable for the state and the nation in contrast to the people from Donbas.

As the authors outline some of the tragic realities of the postrevolutionary period through the lens of postcolonial and feminist critique, they underscore the failures of the modern, ostensibly democratic Ukrainian nation-state to care for all of its citizens. The authors draw on Victoria Hesford’s work on “feminist time” versus “nation time,” where “nation time” blurs with the “emergency time” of late capitalist societies who are in “perpetual war.” This “emergency time” emphasizes a present that is “at once both empty and full—empty of historicity and full of a mythical future” (Hesford and Diedrich 2008, 174). It does so “at the expense of a ‘historicizing, futuritial consciousness’” (193). Mayerchyk, Plakhotnik, and Hesford are in agreement that, to combat this present-oriented emergency time, “thinking matters, especially in a time of war. Speculative, non-instrumental thought, experimental approaches to the present, and a skeptical, historicizing self-critique become acts of resistance in the emergency time of war where action, myth and amnesia become the drugs of certainty” (Hesford and Diedrich 2008, 183).

This is where wild music stands to intervene in the future of sovereignty. Music, an ensemble of social practices that comprise ways of life—enables precisely such “speculative, non-instrumental” thought that might shift the emphasis of a dominant temporality toward the future, even as it draws on historical legacies in order to remake the past and channel desire for the continued existence of a state form in the present. This speculative and non-instrumental capacity of music to be transformational in an expanded political sense is core to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Ranciere (2013). Recently, in a Rancierian vein, the ethnomusicologist Gavin Steingo has written that music has the potential to “double reality, or to allow [individuals] to imagine and even experience a world that does not yet exist” (2016, 9). In this Ukrainian context, the imaginative agency of musicians and audiences who conjure and fleetingly experience such emergent worlds is always informed by a reconceptualization of the contested pasts of Ukraine.

And so, returning to the crumbling amphitheater in Unizh, I ask: When the standard criteria for nationhood do not hold, when the nation is uncoupled from the state, who then has the right to claim a song such as the national anthem—and which sonic-aesthetic-bodily-poetic techniques may be used to trouble conventional senses of ownership? These are not only narrow Ukrainian questions. We see their resonances in the symbolic forms of recent historical struggles in the United States, such Jimi Hendrix’s legendary rearrangements and distortions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock festival in 1969. Or in the raised fists or kneeling bodies of African American athletes affirming their personhood through a “sovereignty of quiet” while the anthem plays (Quashie 2012). Or when immigrant-rights activists protesting then-President George W. Bush’s assertion that the anthem “ought to be sung in English” (Holusha 2006), translated the lyrics into Spanish and sang it in the streets. That episode prompted Judith Butler to suggest that “certain ideas of sensate democracy, of aesthetic articulation within the political sphere, and the relationship between song and what is called the ‘public’” had to be reconsidered when citizens adopt such a “performative politics” (Butler and Spivak 2010, 62–63). If we hear this anthem sung in Unizh as a spontaneous articulation of a new form of “sensate democracy” that coalesced around a community of citizens brought together through sensory—and chiefly acoustic—means, we can apprehend this music for its Wildness, as it refuses a status quo and enacts a mode of hopeful thinking about the future. This wild anthem—one situated example of what I mean by wild music—reveals the interdependence of sovereignty, citizenship, performance, and sound.

EVIDENCE AND ABSENCE

Science is observational and evidentiary. Please accept this wild bouquet of evidence I have collected.

Samantha Hunt, Queer Theorem

Wild Music assembles its “bouquet of evidence” from a variety of sources. I draw first on my decade-long ethnographic engagements in Ukraine. This fieldwork is supplemented with archival research conducted in Western Ukraine and Crimea, as well as ongoing conversations with musicians (often conducted online, through email, text message, and social media). I also address widely circulated media artifacts (YouTube videos, studio recordings, television programs, and Eurovision performances). I strive to connect these ubiquitous digital objects of internet public culture to the thickness of situated ethnographic research. Sherri Ortner, who in 1995 warned of the “thinning” of ethnography that occurs when ethnographic specificity is compromised by taking on deterritorialized objects of study, has more recently asserted that “the study of ‘media’ or ‘public culture’ should not be some niche subfield of anthropology, but rather an aspect of almost any ethnographic project … [A]s long as the study of public culture is not purely a study of texts, but is rather about their production, circulation, and consumption—their interaction with social and political life on the ground” (quoted in Unger 2017).³⁷ Following in the trail of recent exemplary ethnographic studies of media and public culture (see Bickford 2017; Fisher 2016; Kunreuther 2014; Larkin 2008; Meintjes 2003; Novak 2013), I attempt to privilege local knowledge frameworks and to make interpretive moves derived from long-term ethnographic fieldwork even when the ostensible topic of concern is a media text like the Eurovision festival or an online music video.

I wish to clarify here some of the ways in which this study offers a partial view. First, it does not account for most of the commercially successful music that was produced in Ukraine between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, much of which is not etno-muzyka. I would not be surprised if some Ukrainian popular musicians and audiences—fans of Ukrainian rock bands like Okean El’zy, not to mention many estrada (light entertainment), pop, and hip-hop artists—find the frame of Wildness distorting, though I would argue for its presence even in many cases when tropes of exoticism are not foregrounded in obvious ways.³⁸ Second, I do not account for a broad spectrum of political positions, and I especially fail to account for those Ukrainian citizens who are enthusiastic about Russian state power—the examples I chose to write about largely conform to political positions embraced by the makers and fans of etno-muzyka to whom I had access. There are a few reasons for this: one is my politicized subject position as a Ukrainian American, which made it difficult to engage in productive dialogues with pro-Russian citizens, as I described in the preface. Another is due to my initial focus on Hutsuls and Crimean Tatars, where strongly pro-Russian voices were simply not audible in 2008–2009. Finally, personal and professional reasons prevented me from traveling to the war-torn regions of the east after 2014, though I was able to return to post-annexation Crimea for a short visit in 2015.

There is also a deliberate conceptual silence in this book that deserves to be explained, which is my treatment of the topic of nationalism and how it relates to wild music. There are two primary reasons that I de-emphasize nationalism. First, because I am committed to the project of decolonizing ethnomusicology, and because I believe that this entails a reassessment of the traditional theoretical investments that mark our discipline, this extends, in the present study, to the inherited assumption that modern musical cultures relate primarily to the nation—and, by extension, to nationalism. Music’s relationship to nationalism has been a foundational concern of music studies, since the very notion of “folk music” was core to Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of national spirit, identity, and history, as I have already mentioned (Herder 2017; see also Bohlman 2004; Taruskin 2001). Benjamin Teitelbaum’s (2017) vital work on the relationship of music to radical white nationalism in Sweden pursues this theme into the contemporary era. Yet, despite the numerous studies that deepen our understanding of music and its ability to “perform the nation” (Askew 2002; see also Olson 2004; Sugarman 1999; Bohlman 2010), music’s relationship to the state remains under-examined. Moreover, ethnographers of music have yet to engage with sovereignty, having prioritized instead questions of how music is governed through various “micropractices” (Guilbault 2007) or “administered” through state policies and (mutable) ideological mandates (Tochka 2016); how musicians adapt through transitional political-economic orders (Buchanan 2006); or how cosmopolitanism operates within the space of the nation (Turino 2000).³⁹ I am deeply indebted to all of this work. In this project, however, I attempt to invert the flow of power that is usually presupposed in these studies by prioritizing how the musical practices of citizens that comprise cultural “ways of life” contribute to emergent political sovereignties.⁴⁰

The second reason I do not center discussions of nationalism in Wild Music has to do with the fact that Ukrainian nationalism has been overdetermined by the narratives of others—Russia, Europe, the United States—while Ukraine’s emergent twenty-first-century patriotism—exemplified in episodes such as the night at ArtPóle—has been largely overlooked. Therefore, I largely sidestep the nation and the problems of nationalism (which I define here as an ideology of superiority and exceptionalism) in favor of examining the operations of patriotism (loyalty and appreciation for one’s ways of life).⁴¹ This rationale has particular salience for the perennial underdogs of global geopolitics whose “nationalisms” are depicted as threatening and suspicious rather than the stance of ennobled patriotism bequeathed to the victors of geopolitics (Von Hagen 1995).⁴² Though nationalism has operated as a pernicious ideology used to justify violence at points in Ukrainian history, the trope of “Ukrainian nationalism” as it is deployed in the current information war waged by Russia demonstrates how the narratives of a regional superpower flatten or distort the actual threat of Ukrainian xenophobia. During the Maidan Revolution, for example, Russian media narratives decried the rise of a threatening ethno-nationalism in Ukraine, labeling the revolution a fascist coup, even as many Ukrainians celebrated the inclusivity of (especially the early) Maidan protests. Though scholars of Ukraine are doing important work to study the role of right-wing nationalists in escalating violence during the Maidan Revolution (Ishchenko 2016) and those who continue to operate in militias in the eastern border conflict with Russia (Risch 2015), nationalist groups in Ukraine continue to hold little electoral power and possess effectively no formal governing authority in Ukraine at the time of this writing (unlike far-right groups in Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). Nonetheless, the narrative of rabid Ukrainian nationalism is a key weapon deployed in the informational warfare waged by Russia on Ukraine.⁴³

By circumventing these tropes of Ukrainian nationalism, then, Wild Music takes up a challenge set forth by postcolonial and decolonial theorists to provincialize the master narratives of history (Chakrabarty 2000, 41). Alexei Yurchak, in his project to “rehumanize Soviet life,” asserted that “in the case of socialism, especially in Russia, the object of ‘provincializing’ would not just be ‘Europe’ but, more specifically, ‘Western Europe’” (2005, 9).⁴⁴ In Ukraine, however, where even the premodern myths of Russia and Ukraine are bound together through shared sites and figures such as Saint Volodymyr/Vladimir the Great, the urgent need to de-provincialize Ukraine hinges first on its relationship to Russia.⁴⁵ By provincializing Russia, then, one can glean something of how Ukrainians deploy wild music to reimagine the layered imperial and neo-imperial histories that inform contemporary discourses of Ukrainian sovereignty (cf. Fowler 2017, 11).

The unexpected outcomes of the Maidan Revolution have led Ukraine into a seemingly perpetual condition of “war without war and occupation without occupation” (Dunn and Bobick 2014, 405). Despite this, the prospect of a better future is being actively and creatively reimagined by an internet-savvy generation of activists, creators, and performers, who are attached to the idea of Ukrainian statehood and are finding new ways to make and amplify political claims through wild music. This generation tends to reject the creeping authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but they also do not fully embrace faltering European models of nation-statehood. They are suspicious of voracious capitalism and understand the dangerous precedents of “actually existing socialism.” These actors take the Ukrainian past and present seriously on its own terms by attempting to decenter master narratives from both European and Russian perspectives, decoupling nation from state, and privileging patriotism over nationalism. This affords the possibility to consider that, while the Ukrainian state may be considered “fragile” or even “failing” (by some outside metrics and by the account of many of its frustrated, alienated citizenry), it nonetheless remains at the center of the sovereign imaginaries that its citizens are conjuring in wild music.⁴⁶

FIGURE INTRO.4 Graffiti of the word “Revolution” in Independence Square in Kyiv, 2014. Photo by Franz Nicolay.

The six body chapters of Wild Music elaborate on such sovereign imaginaries through examples that reveal the situated knowledges and mediated forms of Wildness that permeate various musical and social contexts of contemporary Ukraine. The following two chapters center on the representation and reception of Western Ukrainian Hutsuls in the Ukrainian mediasphere: first through Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” (Chapter 1) and then through the remediated video of the “freak-cabaret” collective known as the Dakh Daughters (Chapter 2). I then move to analysis of avtentyka singers who compete on the popular reality TV singing competition called Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Nation). Here, I examine how the politics of undisciplined vocal timbre reject logics of success according to the standards of reality TV “democratainment” (Hartley 2004). Their untamed singing remakes failure as an act of refusal of the limited musical forms that dominate Ukrainian media and an assertion of the ungovernability of Ukrainian rural expression. Chapter 4 focuses on the liminal sovereign imaginaries of Crimea as they relate to the “Eastern music” that was branded and broadcast by Radio Meydan, the Crimean Tatar radio station that operated in Simferopol from 2005 until 2015. I demonstrate how the presence of “Eastern music” in the semipublic spaces of microtransit motivated competing sovereign imaginaries among distinct Crimean populations, including the Crimean Tatar Indigenous minority. In Chapter 5, I interpret the sounds of “ethno-chaos” in recordings by the group DakhaBrakha, whose commercial success in the North American and European world music markets positioned its members to speak as “Ambassadors of the Maidan” to the world. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of “soundmarks of sovereignty”—sonic markers of history, territory, and temporality, embodied and subjugated knowledges, and postcolonial reclamation—and examine their relationship to emergent citizenly solidarities. The conclusion develops the idea of acoustic citizenship and explores it as a form of volitional, and therefore limited, citizenship that may have particular salience in imperiled states.

Despite the embattled status of Ukraine and its citizenry during the era that this book examines, I hear many expressions of tentative hope for the future in this wild music. Ortner recently questioned how one might balance an “anthropology of the good life” against the “dark anthropology” that tracks power and inequality in daily life: “How can we be both realistic about the ugly realities of the world today and hopeful about the possibilities of changing them?” (2016, 60). Many of my interlocutors—like the musicians who create wild new forms of etno-muzyka but do not fight to defend Ukrainian sovereignty with weapons of war—point out the potential futility of any music to do anything. I do not dispute that music has little power against bombs, or BUK missiles.⁴⁷ But I also assert that the study of music cannot be consigned only to our study of “the good life” since it is so prominently enmeshed in systems of capital, and therefore in the operations of power, and—importantly—because it also holds the affective power to captivate imaginations, move bodies, and support political actions. The politics and aesthetics of wild music allows us to investigate how the good life is imagined in dark times.