Call for Papers

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.

A number of initiatives have been recently launched in order to (re)discover Ukrainian culture, in order to encourage the development of international cooperation between cultural institutions in Ukraine and in France and to support experts of Ukrainian culture. The artistic avant-gardes of the 1910s have long been of particular interest: their various practices, theoretical discourses, the works they produced, and their influences have been widely studied by the scholarly community. However, as with the figures of Malevich or Roslavets, the place of Ukrainian artists has often been overlooked in the historiography. Current research invites us to rethink their involvement in these movements and to explore the specificity of a Ukrainian school. Their inclusion in a revolutionary historical moment has been discussed at length, and allows us to imagine links between other avant-garde moments (the 1960s, 1990s, and current movements) and revolutionary events that Ukraine has experienced in recent decades. 

It is precisely such a renewal of research that we wish to examine and contextualize at this international event. This conference proposes greater exploration of the contributions of these avant-garde artists with the purpose of demonstrating their collective importance to understanding Ukrainian musical culture. 

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. 

• Rethinking the history of the Avant-garde: how have political and social events affected musical life in Ukraine? What are the links between avant-garde movements and moments of contestation in Ukraine? Studies might refer to regional, international, environmental, and religious crises. 

• Rediscovering the avant-garde(s) I: Ukrainian musical avant-garde between 1910 and 1930 and its links with other artistic disciplines

• Rediscovering the avant-garde(s) II: Ukrainian musical avant-gardes from the 1960s to the present

• Other musics: Exploration of other musical genres

• Musicological research about Ukraine today including subjects that remain unknown and whose study has been historically impeded

• The role of musicians in avant-garde movements

• New perspectives including approaches to decolonizing research

The conference will take place April 24-26, 2024 at Sorbonne University in Paris. Please submit proposals (3000 characters maximum) and a brief autobiography by January 15, 2024 to: UkrainianMusicalAvantgarde@gmail.com

Presentations will be 30 minutes in length followed by a 15 minute discussion period. The languages of the conference are French and English. A publication is planned at the end of the symposium. Publication decisions will be subject to evaluation by a scientific committee.