Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

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