Maria Sonevytsky’s book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Modern Ukraine is a culmination of her doctoral research in ethnomusicology. It examines the state of the modern Ukrainian soundscape, through both mainstream Ukrainian music and music that is not ethnically Ukrainian. For this purpose, Sonevytsky chooses to concentrate on two ethnic groups and their representation on the national and international music scenes—the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains in the west of Ukraine and the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of the Crimean Peninsula. This way, the author offers a nuanced look at Ukrainian music, or music in Ukraine, widening and diversifying the traditional understanding of the region.
She starts with positioning Ukraine on the map of modern Europe. To do so, she refers to the Soviet legacy that, unfortunately, shaped and continues to shape Ukraine today, making it a post-Soviet, post-socialist, and/or post-communist country, at least from the Western perspective. For instance, in chapter 3, “Ungovernable Timbres: The Failures of the Rural Voice on Reality TV” and chapter 5, “Ethno-Chaos: Provincializing Russia Through Ukrainian World Music,” she discusses Soviet censorship and control over the Ukrainian folksinging sound, which sprang back twice as hard (or twice as loud) in the independent Ukraine after 1991.
Wild Music starts with a detailed description of the sonic and visual experience of the loud, piercing trembita sound on the Eurovision stage in 2004—the act Wild Dances by Ukrainian singer Ruslana that brought the first-ever Eurovision victory to the country. Sonevytsky contextualizes this act within Ruslana’s aesthetics. A few years earlier, Ruslana in her videoclip “Znayu Ya" (I Know) used a metaphor of an ethnographer discovering the “noble savages”—the Herderian “folk”—the Hutsul people in the Carpathian Mountains. The very name of the song suggests that she got to know the essence, the true nature of the people and their culture, secluded in the Ukrainian highlands. Later, when she used tropes and the melodies of the Hutsuls in her winning song “Wild Dances” at Eurovision-2004, she appeared in an Amazonka-like costume, with animal skin and fur covering small parts of her body. As part of her ethnographic research, Sonevytsky followed up with the local people with whom Ruslana consulted before writing her Eurovision song. The interlocutors were both honored to be referenced at the international music competition, but also unhappy with labeling their culture as “wild.” Sonevytsky argues that at the second-ever Ukrainian appearance at the Eurovision Song Contest, Ruslana suggested and attracted an Oriental gaze on Ukraine, the “terra incognita” of Europe. She calls this move “auto-exoticism,” used rather as a marketing tool than a malicious act of belittling Ukrainian culture.
In chapter 4, “Eastern Music: The Liminal Sovereign Imaginaries of Crimea,” Sonevytsky talks in detail about the brutal Soviet mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1942, followed by five decades of oppression and the underground practice of their native language and music in exile. She discusses the racialized sound of the Crimean Tatars, who are a Turkic Muslim minority officially recognized by the Ukrainian government as an indigenous group of the Crimean Peninsula. The ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious differences, reflected in their music, created some tensions with the mostly ethnically Russian population of the Crimea, who were, and still are, being encouraged by the occupational Russian authorities of the region to replace vacant spaces after the Crimean Tatar deportation. The author observes:
“Many [of her informants] reported they ‘felt they were in a different country’ when listening to [Crimean Tatar] Radio Meidan in a local mini-bus marshrutka […]—xenophobic reactions amounting to belief that Crimean Tatars were overstepping their place in Crimea” (121).
On the other hand, Jamala, a pop singer of Crimean Tatar origin, represented Ukraine at Eurovision-2016, earning a victory for Ukraine with her song "1944" about “Sürgunlik”—the deportation, ethnic cleansing, and cultural genocide of her people, that touched her family as well. At one point in the song, she sings a melody that resembles that of an imam singing during prayer in a mosque, thus providing a strong case for bringing the sound of Islam to Eurovision, as an entry from Ukraine. Having the reputation of being highly political in its nature, the Eurovision Song Contest serves as an international platform for self-representation and for creating a self-image of the nation for many Ukrainians. Every year the Eurovision national selection process brings about conversations, mostly on social media, on how people want Ukraine to be represented and by whom. For this reason, a decision to “send off” an ethnically non-Ukrainian performer to Eurovision is a huge step towards diversifying both bodily and sonic self-imagery of Ukrainians.[1]
Sonevytsky traces the transnational connections of the community. Although she doesn’t go to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan where many Crimean Tatars were forcibly deported, she does acknowledge the impact that five decades of deportation had on the community, before they were free to come back home to their native land, the Crimean Peninsula, in the 1990s, around the time of the collapse of the USSR.
The author also includes the lens of migration and diaspora studies. Life in deportation had a significant effect on the Crimean Tatar community and their understanding of themselves and their history. People were not allowed to use words like “Crimea” or “Motherland” in public, or to speak their native language in public. The only newspaper in the Crimean Tatar language was published and disseminated underground. A song, “Ey, güsel Qirim” (Oh, Beautiful Crimea) became an unofficial anthem of the people’s resistance, a memory anchor, and a means for vocal and musical expression of longing for their stolen Motherland. Crimean Tatar musician DJ Bebek’s 2004 album Deportacia (Deportation) addresses these experiences. Sonevytsky writes:
“Popular folk melodies and dances played by traditional Turkic instruments, as well as Soviet-era instruments associated with institutionalized folklore (such as the accordion and trumpet) appear on the twelve tracks of the album” (130).
This way, DJ Bebek captures the changing sound picture from traditional Crimean Tatar to pseudo-national Soviet sound. This illustrates how sonic and identity hybridity are at the center of the diaspora experience. Sonevytsky considers transnational and global connections, migration routes, and diasporic hybrid identities that have an inevitable effect on music creation and practice.
In chapter 5, Sonevytsky also writes about fusions and experiments with genres. For instance, she dedicates an entire chapter to the world music band DakhaBrakha. They play around with genres and instruments (goblet drum, didgeridoo, cajón, tabla, djembe, ukulele, zgaleyka, various flutes, etc.), adding Ukrainian folk vocals with their loud, open-throat singing technique. For instance, one of the early DakhaBrakha songs is called “Karpatskiy rep" (Carpathian rap). Nina Garenetska on vocals raps in Ukrainian, in a Hutsul dialect to be precise, a story of a young girl who cannot choose among dozens of suitors, and she also interchangeably sings the chorus, which is a couplet in northeastern regional Ukrainian dialect.
The band also released the album Shliakh (Path, or Route) after the 2014 Russian annexation of the Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine. In this album they copied a common route of a chumak—a salt merchant—across Ukraine all the way to the Black Sea and the Crimea. The musicians included songs from various regions of Ukraine that the chumaks would pass on their way. One of the songs is “Salgir Boyu" (Give/Take) in the Crimean Tatar language. This album was a political statement of the band, that Ukraine is one and indivisible, yet internally diverse. She calls this move “bricolaging the state.”
Sonevytsky raises the question of authenticity, a loaded term in Western folklore research. She articulates two different groups in Ukraine that use the notion of avtentyka (authenticity) in music: “First, the urban practitioners and scholars (folklorists, ethnomusicologists) dedicated to preserving and singing village materials thought to be uncontaminated by colonial encounter and Soviet cultural policy. Second, the village-based singers and ensembles who are considered to be the surviving link to this precolonial ‘uncontaminated’ vocality” (89).
The author sees Ukraine’s “return to its musical roots” in the post-Soviet period as a way of reclaiming what was lost, or almost lost, as a part of the ongoing national revival movement, and marking its cultural borders through sound. The theme of nostalgia is also present in Sonevytsky’s chapter 3, “Ungovernable Timbres.” At the same time, she discusses how the raw “authentic” sound did not find a place in the finals of the glamorous Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Country) competition. The song from a particular village that Oleksiy Zayets sang turned out to be not mainstream enough for modern Ukrainians across the country to identify with. Thus, by extension, avtentyka is not the voice of the nation (or at least it was not in the mid-2010s).
Sonevytsky refers to two revolutions in Ukraine—the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan, or the Revolution of Dignity, in 2013-14, that became tipping points in the modern history of Ukraine and its people fighting for democracy and the freedom of choosing their own future. She writes about the singer Ruslana at the peaceful Orange Revolution in 2004, right around the time when her “Wild Dances” went viral. With her song, and her look, Ruslana embodied unstoppable, wild revolutionary energy and the spirit of the Ukrainian people to speak up and make themselves visible and heard. Sonevytsky also gives much attention to the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity, that turned out to be a tragic, blood-spilling moment in modern Ukrainian history, when about one-hundred protesters were violently killed by the special police force Berkut, following the order of the corrupt, odious pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, right on the main Independence Square in Kyiv, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Square of Independence). The peaceful protests were first called Euromaidan, for the pro-European values and political orientation of the protesters. The fallen protesters became known as the “Heavenly Hundred.”
Within the context of the Euromaidan, the author devotes chapter 2, “Freak Cabaret: Politics and Aesthetics in the Times of Revolution,”to the band Dakh Daughters. Called by the official media, and on social media, different names, from “hipsters” to “fascists,” and being compared to Pussy Riot, they presented a feminist view on the revolution. In fact, Sonevytsky claims, they embody an image of the free-willed, nationalist-oriented Ukrainian woman, something that Russian propaganda links to the Nazis. Stepan Bandera was a Ukrainian anti-Soviet oppositional leader at the beginning of the Soviet Occupation, for which Russia still falsely portrays him as a Nazi. Banderivets is a slur used to call a Ukrainian a Nazi, and Banderivka, according to this logic, is a female Ukrainian Nazi. This way, through their look, sound, and witty humor, Dakh Daughters became the female Ukrainian feminist face of the Euromaidan revolution. Such attention to the revolutionary events in Ukraine demonstrates how the author is attuned to the rapid social and political changes in the country, and to how these changes are reflected in its modern soundscapes.
Due to the nature of her research, Sonevytsky includes both rural and urban spaces as her field sites. She interviews people in villages of the Carpathian Mountains, small towns in Crimea, but also musicians in large cities like Kyiv, Lviv, and Simferopol. She doesn’t limit her ethnomusicological research to certain areas (rural, remote), but rather recognizes the omnipresence of the effects that popular music has on society. Her research also involves explorations of the “border mentality,” as opposed to the mainstream, central spaces for music making and music practicing.
Not only the content of the book, but also Sonevytsky’s writing adds to the larger effort of decolonizing knowledge about Ukraine. In “Note on Names and Transliteration,” she provides explanations for the orthographic choices she makes, and justifies them as yet another step away from viewing Ukraine through the imperial Russian lens, through which even the name of Ukraine’s own capital became known to the world through Russian transliteration (i.e., Kyiv, not Kiev). Sonevytsky also acknowledges her own positionality as a Western researcher, although of Ukrainian descent, and does not shy away from discussing her own reasons for engaging in this research project.
Overall, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Modern Ukraine does the important work of recentering and deprovincializing Ukraine, decolonizing the narratives of its history, and returning its subjectivity. The scope, the depth, and the profoundness of Maria Sonevytsky’s work is truly impressive.
Note:
[1] In 2023, the Ukrainian band Tvorchi with a Nigerian-born lead singer, following victory at the Eurovision national selection, represented Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, England, held on behalf of Ukraine due to the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The Eurovision national selection process in Ukraine includes a jury vote but, more importantly, a popular vote of Ukrainian residents. This is the second time a Black Ukrainian musician went to Eurovision.
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[Review Length: 2126 words • Review posted on September 16, 2025]