Music written in Ukraine has a long history of engaging with the avant-garde. Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, composers living and working within the borders of contemporary Ukraine experimented freely with all new musical movements, including expressionism, impressionism, dodecaphony, neoclassicism, and neofolklorism. Openness to all forms of innovation has, in fact, been considered a defining component of Ukrainian modernism by scholars in the fields of visual art, literature, and theater. Despite efforts at artistic suppression within Ukraine as early as the 1930s, the experimental impulse awakened during the revolutionary period can be charted throughout Ukrainian composition of the 20th century to the present. This conference seeks to put into perspective the contemporaneity of these experiments by exploring Ukrainian music of various time periods, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

The colloquium aims to shed light on the various Ukrainian avant-garde movements in music, from the 1910s to today. We welcome contributions to the following theoretical and analytical themes, as well as other topics engaged with the concept of musical avant-garde practices in Ukraine over the past century.