Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

music
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Mariana Sadovska
Björk meets Pete Seeger
Mariana Sadovska, now known as the ‘Ukrainian
Björk’, was on holiday, hiking in the Carpathian
Mountains. She wasn’t a musician back then, and
hadn’t planned to become one. But in the mountains,
by chance, she heard a woman singing.
“It was this traditional, authentic voice; raw, not
polished, not trained in a school, just like how
women sing in the Carpathian Mountains. I fell so
much in love. From that moment, I didn’t understand
why, but I really wanted to get in touch with
such music.
“I was already travelling a lot in the villages, and
I never could give a clear answer for why I was
doing it; I just felt that I wanted to get to know this
culture.”
Growing up in western Ukraine in the 70s and 80s,
Sadovska had spoken Ukrainian, “but I knew that
in the east, it was different. To speak Ukrainian
was not cool; it was like a village language. If you
wanted a prestigious job, you’d better speak Russian.
All this authentic culture was exchanged for
a very strange creation, Soviet folklore. They were
trying to replace it, and in some places they managed
to do it. I grew up with the feeling that they
managed to do it everywhere.”
Also, “young people were moving to the cities…
this traditional passage [of songs], from grandmother
to mother, from mother to daughter,
was broken. It was very much seen as something
uncool.”
After discovering that her own mother hadn’t
really learned the songs of the previous generation,
Sadovska recorded her grandmother and
grandmother’s sister singing them, just for her own
interest, with no thought of becoming a singer or
folk-song collector.
She’d studied classical piano, but decided against
it as a career, and went to work for a theatre group
which had a philosophical interest in “the theatrical
element in life, and especially in rituals, and traditional
life… Anywhere where we were going to
perform, we were trying to get in touch with their
traditional culture.”
So it seemed like a natural progression when, after
her encounter in the Carpathians, Sadovska spent
15 years travelling around rural areas of Ukraine,
collecting traditional songs. Her subjects were keen
to pass them on, as if they “couldn’t die before they
gave their songs to somebody”.
She found love songs, and sad songs, but also ritual
songs: to bring the spring, to prevent rain during
harvest time, or to bless a newly married couple.
“To discover that this culture did survive the Soviet
era and has nothing to do with the Soviet era -
this culture reaches to a very ancient time, before
Christianity - it’s like suddenly finding gold in the
earth. That’s how I felt. And I felt it was my task to
share it with the world outside Ukraine. I always
wanted to be a kind of messenger of my culture.”
Steve Ramsey
Sadovska will perform traditional Ukrainian songs in
a modern style, dueting with a ‘German percussionist
and electronica specialist’, Wed 22nd April,
Brighton Dome Studio Theatre, 7.30pm, £12/£10
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