Roman Turovsky-Savchuk: Dialogues with Time

Dialogues with Time

Album notes by Roman Turovsky-Savchuk

Clamour, clamour, clamour in the forest,
The fog is covering the fields,
The fog is covering the fields, the fields.
A mother is sending her son away:
Go, my son, go away from me…

At the age of seventeen I was transplanted from my birthplace of Kyiv in Ukraine. Before my eyes, a dreamy European city was replaced by New York, with all its severity of lines and colours, unforgiving yet intriguing. I had painted since childhood, learning visual precision and honesty and developing a firm faith in harmony, beauty and perfection. My new reality was rough and fearsome, and I knew that I was being transformed. This new reality brought a new simplicity and roughness into my work. I painted nudes, craving love, music and spiritual fulfilment. All of these eventually came, bringing happiness to the émigré, exile and refugee, transforming him into an American:

Come back, my son, come back to me, my boy,
So I may wash your head.
Mother, my head may be washed by rain,
And my hair shall be combed by feral winds…

There has always been music in my family. My father is a painter, but he was also a fine classical baritone in his younger days. Our house was always full of interesting guests from all the arts. The grown-ups were infinitely more interesting than children of my own age. They bore the historical weight of the place where I was growing up. Their sense of history intoxicated me, inexorably and forever, even though I was unaware of it at the time. It manifested itself much later in my music.

I naturally studied painting from an early age, and it would always remain my main calling. Inexplicably, I remained indifferent to music, despite being surrounded by it, until the age of fourteen, when I had an epiphany on hearing Siegfried’s Funeral Music in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. It opened the floodgates of music to me. I continued studying painting after coming to New York. There I studied lute with Patrick O’Brien, who also taught me the basics of harmony and counterpoint. I began composing for myself during the 1990s, concentrating on the Baroque idiom and my chosen instrument, the Baroque lute. This instrument does not tolerate gratuitous dissonance, and my compositions naturally took on the style and character of earlier periods such as the Renaissance and Baroque.

Then came other momentous developments: the spread of the internet, which enabled me to connect with many colleagues worldwide, and my renewed interest in Ukrainian musical culture in general and its Baroque period in particular.

Ukrainian folk music is unique in many respects. The vast majority of it is in minor keys: happy music is more often than not still in the minor, simply at a faster tempo. It is also probably among the best-documented folk traditions, with many collections compiled since the eighteenth century. It enjoyed a period of popularity in Western Europe around 1800 and left its mark on several composers, not least Beethoven. The literary qualities of its texts are astounding, their imagery profound. Its texts are often hair-raisingly violent as well as breathtakingly lyrical. This music is powerful. I did not choose it: it chose me. This reconnection with Ukrainian music was a true epiphany, from which I, as a displaced individual, drew a sense of complete rootedness in that Old World, paradoxically in harmony with the American identity I had gained through the tribulations of emigration.

My familiarity with existential angst was counterbalanced by happiness found in cultural memory: the memory of old songs amid new forms — the bridges, highways and skyscrapers of the New World. It later found expression in several video installations for which I also composed and produced the soundtracks. These installations were built around a clear central principle: each sequence represented a further stage in a journey through forbidding space, in which the only available means of remaining afloat were certain personal cultural memories, remnants or fragments of beauty in a decidedly unbeautiful universe. In my case these were the auditory memories of my early childhood, specifically memories of polyphonic laments sung by girls as they crossed the river in the evening to milk the cows grazing on the other side.

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” In 2000 I undertook research into the history of the torban, the Ukrainian variety of lute. The repertoire for this instrument did not survive, as it belonged largely to an oral culture, so I began to use Ukrainian melodies in compositions intended as reconstructions of this lost musical microcosm. In time I began to experiment with progressively earlier musical styles, early Renaissance and late medieval, in combination with Ukrainian folk melodies that were archaic in character and readily lent themselves to the compositional techniques of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The milkmaids’ choirs of my early memories were a perfect match for diminutions and variation cycles for lute in the style of Joanambrosio Dalza, Francesco da Milano or John Dowland. This project had been nearly ten years in the making, with over 700 pieces to its credit. Initially I called these pieces Cantiones Sarmaticae; they were later augmented by Cantiones Ruthenicae, Sarmatoruthenicae, Lodomericae and others, in a nod to Sarmatism, a cultural movement in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Each of these cycles became progressively more adventurous and complex, so I later gave them the collective title Mikrokosmos, in an insolent lutenist’s challenge to Béla Bartók’s keyboard cycle of the same name. In the process of composition I discovered not only numerous structural similarities between Ukrainian dance melodies and Renaissance dances from Western Europe, but also evidence that some late Renaissance melodies had survived in Ukrainian folk music. I was also struck by the medieval, conductus-like sound of the folk polyphony of the Polissya region of Ukraine, from which my family came. These observations became inspirations, and the music flowed, in strict style but with the unusual cadences and forbidden intervals of that land.

Such were my dialogues with Time.

Recording credits

Massimo Marchese, lute. Recorded at Massimo Marchese Studio in 2017. Cover: anonymous eighteenth-century Ukrainian painting. Design, art direction and production: Osaka Mozart Association. Copyright in the sound recording and artwork: Osaka Mozart Association. ℗ and © Da Vinci Classics. DDD; manufactured in Japan.