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,