We are honoured to announce this timely guest lecture by a distinguished American ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College, New York),

Instrumentalizing the Politics of Aesthetics in a Time of War: Ukrainian Popular Musicians at the Cultural Front.

Faculty of Humanities (Pátkova 5, Troja), on Monday, October 17, from 16,00 to 17.20, in aula Jana Sokola

Abstract
What can music do to battle against the

unspeakable violence of war? Since the full-scale

Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February

2022, Ukrainian musicians of all genres, from all

regions of the country, have asked themselves this

question. Expanding upon my previous work

applying feminist theories of the "emergency time"

that emphasizes a present "at once both empty

and full—empty of historicity and full of a mythical

future" (Hesford and Diedrich 2008; Plakhotnik and

Mayerchuk 2019), this project analyzes how

musicians of various popular genres have been

instrumentalizing the politics of musical aesthetics

to articulate visions of Ukrainian futurity From the

self-proclaimed "ethno-chaos" act of

DakhaBrakha, to the new etno-hip-hop partnership

of rapper Alyona Alyona and Tik Tok star Jerry Heil,

to the viral pop re-imaginings of a century-old

Ukrainian patriotic song, to emerging

collaborations across ethnic and genre lines, I tease

out some of the irreducible paradoxes and the

agonistic processes that mark these experiments in

using pop music as a weapon.

Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard

College, New York, USA. Her first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in

Ukraine, won the Lewis Lockwood First Book Prize from the American

Musicological Society in 2020. Her forthcoming book, Vopli Vidopliassova's

Tantsi, Will be released in the Spring of 2023 (Bloomsbury, 331/3 Europe series)

along with a re-mastered recording of Tantsi, the cassette recording first

circulated by these late Soviet Ukrainian punk trailblazers in 1989.