Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  The Chanting Flute: Uncovering Russian Orthodox and Shamanic Sounds in Sofia Gubaidulina's ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (2005) (2025) author(s): Phoebe Grace Robertson published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In the early years of the Soviet era, the music of two Russian faith traditions was forced into the shadows. Siberian shamans preserved chants and folk knowledge despite intense persecution, and Russian Orthodox monks preserved early forms of plainchant in remote monasteries away from the watchful eye of the government. Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), herself a member of the richly-historied and often-marginalized Tatar people, became a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian in the 1960s. During the 1970s, she began performing improvisations with her ensemble Astraea, familiarizing herself with many instruments used by Siberian shamans. Her references to shamanism continued to increase among her concert-hall compositions over the following decades. As a new generation began to embrace the freedom to part from state-sponsored atheism during the 1990s and 2000s, shamanic chanting and Russian Orthodox Znamenny chant experienced a renaissance of practice and scholarly interest. Gubaidulina responded with her music: in her 2005 flute concerto …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Gubaidulina’s flute soloist takes on the role of chanter. Drawing on Tia DeNora’s research in the sociology of concerto forms, Kofi Agawu’s framework of musical “topics,” and the composer’s own reflections on the concerto metaphor, this article analyzes how Gubaidulina frames the solo flutist as Siberian shaman and Russian Orthodox cantor within subsequent episodes of this concerto. In this way, the soloist “speaks” through the music of these faith traditions that remained underground for much of Gubaidulina’s adult life. …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair is a flute concerto deserving of its title, demonstrating the dynamic potential of works by post-Soviet composers to contend with the sociological tensions that affect any individual whose cultural, ethnic, or spiritual identity has been the target of discriminatory policies.
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  Intermediality And Text-to-Sound Transmutations. Interview with Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthia Jenrbekova of krëlex zentre (2025) author(s): Vadim Keylin published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Maria Vilkovisky is a poetess, musician, artist, and curator born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She graduated from the Kazakh State Conservatory as a violist, worked in the opera house orchestra, studied at the “Musagethes” literary school for writers in Almaty and at the curatorial summer school in Moscow. She is co-founder of a long-term para-institutional project called Krëlex zentre (together with Ruthia Jenrbekova), and from 2011–2014 she ran an art space in Almaty. She lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Ruthia Jenrbekova is an artist and researcher from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She holds an MA in ecology and works as an intermedia cultural organizer. She is co-founder of Krëlex zentre together with Maria Vilkovisky. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Her fields of interest: queer ecology, material semiotics, arts-based methodologies, transfeminism. Krëlex zentre is a paranormal art institution that builds on cultural traditions of intermixed planetary diasporas, develops inclusive aesthetics, and promotes queer cosmo-politics. This interview by poet and Sound Studies scholar Vadim Keylin took place from March to April 2024 via Google Docs and has been edited for clarity. Literature references were added during the editing process.
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  Singing at Your Own Funeral: Overdubbed Intimacy and the Persistence of Tradition in Soviet Georgia (2025) author(s): Brian Fairley published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In February 1967, a funeral service was held for the Georgian singer and choirmaster Artem Erkomaishvili. As they bore his body from the municipal theatre in Ozurgeti to his family plot in a nearby village, a recording of the Georgian Orthodox rite for the dead emanated from a portable tape player. The voice on the recording belonged to Artem himself – by this time, no one else in officially atheist Soviet Georgia knew the traditional requiem chants. The previous year, Artem had been involved in an experimental recording at the Tbilisi Conservatory, and he later applied the same technique to capture the three-part chants: going back and forth between two tape recorders, he overdubbed his own voice until all three parts were layered together. Artem’s remarkable, six-decade career stretched from the earliest commercial recordings of Georgian folk music in 1907 to the widespread use of consumer tape-recording technology in the 1960s. His chant recordings – both the conservatory project and the private funeral tapes – were made outside of formal channels of music production and distribution, employing amateur equipment and foregrounding the intimacy of the unvarnished voice. In this way, they resemble magnitizdat, the private tape recordings of poetry and song that circulated unofficially in the late Soviet period (Daughtry 2009). Made at a time when sacred music was still heavily censored, Artem’s recordings occupied the grey area between officially sanctioned and explicitly dissident expression. Building on recent work exploring sound in everyday Soviet experience (Cornish 2020) and expanding the discussion of Georgian music beyond the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology, I argue that such private practices of listening and recording provided a means for Georgians in the post-Thaw era to grapple with questions of faith, the loss of tradition, the polyphony of a fracturing state, and the afterlife of a single voice.
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  Voices, Noises, and Silence in the Political Soundscape of Belarus (2025) author(s): Pavel Niakhayeu published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.
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  “Songs of despair and freedom”. Interview with Sashko Protyah. (2025) author(s): Vadim Keylin published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He's a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army. This interview was taken in February 2024 over email.
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  A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad (2025) author(s): Sam Riley published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).
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