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About singing in Ukrainian with Ukrainians, May 21st [1]
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Date: 2023-05-22
We made the official debut of our Ukrainian Folk Music program May 21st 2023. We raised money for Save The Children, learned a lot about Ukraine culture, and conducted a community organizing event, all rolled into one.
I’d written about this a couple of times since January. A group of Mainers who are aficionados of slavic music, have been rehearsing weekly and the day arrived for the initial concert. We were fortunate to sing in the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. The priest here has been outspoken against the Russian invasion since the beginning. Here on Daily Kos, we often look at video clips of people being killed, with a sound track of Ukrainian death metal. Our choice of songs was guided by the desire to focus on positive aspects of family life and to give a sense of hope.
Eastern Orthodox Icons
From the outside the venue does not draw attention to itself. It’s a brick building among brick buildings in an older section of Portland — the “West End.” I gasped when I walked in, it was like stepping into a movie set.
from the balcony during the pre-concert warmup with no audience. It seats 200 people. The icons were — well — iconic!
It was beautiful and created an atmosphere better than if you were on the scene of a movie being filmed on location. This is the best place in the State of Maine to sing songs of Ukraine.
Many of our group had never been inside an orthodox church before. The setting imparted a sense of history and gravitas. The acoustics were excellent.
Video
Since the pandemic, the church livestreams their services on YouTube, and so the cameras and mikes were already in place. As is de rigeur these days, audience members used their smartphone, then sent clips to the FaceBook pages that many Ukrainians follow. We were fortunate to also find a top notch videographer who is Ukrainian American, lives in Auburn Maine, and did not have her usual schedule of weddings on this day.
The first comment about the video above, was to bookmark where each song began.
QR Code
The concert served a dual function as a fundraiser. We set up a QR code and many attendees used that method to donate. This system lessened the amount of cash and checks needing to be processed. We were transparent about where the funds were going when we used this system. We still took in $4,000 cash. Ther person who set up the QR code did not use the option that allows us to track the number of hits. Alas!
We used a translator recommended by one of refugee case managers, and she used “consecutive translation” as you will see. The script was written out, but as you will see I am not always easy to follow. We knew there would be many curious Ukrainians in the audience. She conveyed a great sense of humor in her role.
Pronunciation
We got many compliments on our pronunciation of the lyrics. To be truthful, the two Directors assigned many of the leading roles to the native Ukrainian speakers in the group. Learning to sing in a foreign language is a daunting task for any singer, and Ukrainian is notorious for the number of vowels. We used the computer to transliterate the words — i.e., apply the system of American alphabet to represent corresponding sounds from Ukrainian. In the endeavor, you eventually learn to read using the Cyrillic system. At the beginning, singing in this genre is frustrating until you get into the flow of the words.
Melodic and Harmonic system of slavic music.
There are signatures that mark a tune as slavic. singing in “bright voice,” using parallel thirds, minor keys, ways to end the syllables, how to breathe.
Adding to the media package
We now are accumulating an updated library of video clips. These days if you are a singing group and you wish to sing at a festival they always ask to see your videotape. Until now we didn’t not have one. Just because we did this concert does not mean we are done for the summer. We will take it on the road. It is a way to keep the topic of Ukraine in front of everyone.
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