In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky explores the political potentialities of ‘Wildness’ in folk-inflected Ukrainian popular music. Temporally, the book concentrates on a ‘revolutionary decade’ bookended by seismic political shifts (2004's Orange Revolution; 2013–2014's Euromaidan protests and loss of Crimea) and Eurovision wins (2004, 2016). Theoretically, Sonevytsky engages with sovereignty through the lens of the state, rather than the nation, to argue that the master trope of Wildness allows Ukrainian citizens to imagine and work toward a better future, rejecting both ethnic exclusivity and the simplistic binary choice between Russia and the West. In her words, ‘wild music allows us to investigate how the good life is imagined in dark times’ (p. 26). Her writing displays the insight of a diaspora-born ‘halfie’ who first visited Ukraine as a child and has been conducting fieldwork there since 1999.
The theme of Wildness, a ‘border epistemology’ (p. 4), binds the book's five case studies into a whole, although it appears in many different forms and changes its meaning over time – the pop star Ruslana, whose 2004 Eurovision-winning hit ‘Wild Dances’ provides the justification for the theme, has already interpreted Wildness in three different ways during her career trajectory. Sonevytsky defines ‘wild music’ as ‘when tropes of exoticism are strategically integrated in musical performances in order to make political claims’, drawing upon a ‘discursive (uppercased) Wildness that has long defined Ukraine's liminal position in the world’ (p. 2). As such, the book contributes to a body of literature on the agentive use of strategic essentialism and auto-orientalism in asserting personal or political claims. With Ruslana, Wildness is an emic concept; in most of the other cases, interlocutors employ a similar idea that challenges decorum or governmentality while building new forms of solidarity.
While the shifting meaning of Wildness may discomfit some readers, it gives Sonevytsky latitude to explore a broad array of cases. She spotlights some of Ukraine's most famous global exports, including DakhaBrakha, recent ‘ethno-chaos’ stars of the international touring circuit. Other case studies treat the invention of ‘Eastern music’ as a radio category for and by Crimean Tatars, and the Dakh Daughters’ choice to shed artistic detachment and take a somewhat ironic political stand in the revolutionary moment (their very ambivalence unintentionally feeding into Russian claims that fascists were responsible for the Euromaidan protests). Hutsuls and Crimean Tatars, borderland ethnic groups who have had very different roles in the Ukrainian national imaginary but today are similarly invested in an independent Ukrainian state, each feature in multiple chapters.
The ethnography takes a hybrid tack, including numerous descriptions of fieldwork experiences alongside audiovisual analysis of songs, albums, music videos, television and radio broadcasts, and social media. Theoretically, it is very sophisticated, engaging concepts such as sovereign imaginaries, ethnic intimacy, aesthetic distancing and epistemic ambivalence as political strategy, soundmarks, bricolage and acoustic citizenship. Sonevytsky has a great ear for the telling field anecdote, such as the hostile minibus interaction she had with two Russian-speakers when they learned that she spoke Ukrainian better than Russian and was interested in the music of Crimean Tatars. Chapters discussing the Dakh Daughters and DakhaBrakha primarily analyse audiovisual texts, leaving me wanting to hear more from interlocutors on the ground. In these chapters, Sonevytsky positions herself as the insider interpreter. However, a chapter on Ruslana contains both music-video analysis and many personal interviews with the Hutsul villagers who provided Ruslana's artistic inspiration. Auto-ethnography is not unacceptable – I particularly appreciated a chapter on avtentyka (authentic) folk performers who compete on the singing competition ‘Ukrainian Voice’, part of a global television franchise that typically eschews styles outside the Euro-American pop mainstream. Sonevytsky draws upon her own long-time engagement with the avtentyka movement as scholar-performer to analyse how the village voice combines both discipline and abandon, and challenges multiple levels of artistic and political hegemony through its ‘ungovernable timbres’. This chapter in particular will be of interest to critical voice scholars.
Most of my criticism hinges on minor matters. I found some of the interpretive claims a bit of a stretch – for example, playing unremarkable chordal accompaniment on a button accordion may be a utilitarian artistic choice or a reflection of the player's abilities rather than the anti-virtuosic repudiation of Soviet aesthetics that Sonevytsky asserts (p. 153). I was also surprised by the uppercase usage of ‘Indigenous’ in describing Ukrainian village practices (pp. 43, 93, 145) – the term's applicability to the Crimean Tatars, constitutionally recognised as an Indigenous minority, is not in doubt, but the concept loses something when it is taken simply as a synonym for ‘rural’, ‘animist’, ‘non-globalised’ or ‘deep-rooted’ as appears to be the case here.
More generally, I am not sure that it is really possible to escape the frame of nationalism yet. Loyalty to a state founded on voluntary pan-ethnic affective alliances is essentially civic nationalism, which has existed as an alternative to ethnic nationalism for centuries. Sonevytsky further argues that the assertion of a territorialised rurality is a way to refuse national logics (p. 91), and that attributing song interpretation to individual personal sources rather than anonymous tradition marks a refusal to allow folk style to stand for national form (pp. 110–111). However, these claims require clearer evidence of the performers’ political intentions, since in many parts of the post-Soviet world, the proud assertion of locality and individuality – province, region, village, musical family lineage – is easily nested within a nationalist project, in line with the Soviet ethnographic interest in enumerating regional ‘dialects’ of a broader ethnic essence.
Overall, Wild Music offers a very welcome musico-political analysis of a country that continues to inspire controversy and confusion outside its borders, thanks in no small part to Russia's orientalist attempts to control the global narrative about its neighbour (through now-familiar disinformation tactics). It shows that many Ukrainian musicians and citizens are dreaming of a better future without falling into ethnic exclusivism, while retaining their investment in a state that often fails them. Sonevytsky's book is grounded, theoretically sound and beautifully written, and it deserves to be read by ethnomusicologists interested in political power, the voice, or post-socialist cultural forms.
