Music Five College Ethnomusicology Certificate Celebration

Join the Five College Ethnomusicology community for a celebration of graduating certificate recipients, who will each give presentations about their work. The event concludes with a talk by noted ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky, associate professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, titled "Trolling the Komsomol: The Irreverent and Anti-Imperial Critique of Soviet Ukrainian Punk."

In 2019, the original band members of Ukraine’s first punk band, Vopli Vidopliassova (referred to by fans as "Ve-Ve" or "VV"), insisted to Sonevytsky that they did not think of their 1980s punk rock as engaged in any kind of direct protest of Soviet power. Yet the band's irreverent shtick, their perfection of the late Soviet genre of satire known as stiob, and their inventive uses of language and sound activated something among the young nonconformists of late Soviet Kyiv. Among other pastimes, they reveled in "trolling the Komsomol," the Communist Youth League that controlled many aspects of youth culture at the time.

In this presentation, Sonevytsky reckons with the impact and legacy of VV, situating the band not only in the context of the 1980s, but also up to and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. As an exercise in historical ethnography, popular music scholarship, Soviet cultural critique and Ukrainian historiography, this presentation probes the affordances of various disciplinary traditions in a wartime era of continuous emergency.

Sonevytsky's first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (Wesleyan University Press), was awarded the 2020 Lewis Lockwood First Book Prize by the American Musicological Society. Her second book project, Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi, will be out in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Europe series in spring 2023. It will be published alongside the first official release of the band’s cult 1989 album Tantsi, a project which she curated for Org Music. She is currently at work on her third book project, on children’s music in Soviet Ukraine, in addition to her pursuits as a performer of Ukrainian and other repertoires.

Refreshments will be provided. The celebration is FREE and open to the public. Students wishing to learn more about the Five College Certificate in Ethnomusicology are especially encouraged to attend.

Contact info: Junko Oba, chair of the Five College Ethnomusicology Committee, joHA@hampshire.edu