Since childhood I have heard and learned many Ukrainian folk songs. But when I became an adult and first heard Nina Matvienko, I couldn’t understand where she got her deep timbre and her powerful voice that rips out of her chest and seems to rise to the limitless spaces, filling it and calling out to listeners to follow. After she became famous, Nina said that she owed her talent primarily to her mother from whom she inherited her voice and love of folk songs.
She also mentioned her fellow villagers in Nedilyshche, Yemilchyne raion, who were all good singers. I often recalled her words during a solo vocal competition, where a prize named after Matvienko was to be conferred on the winner. The competition was held in Yemilchyne as part of the folk festival “Poliske pereveslo.” In fact, the renowned singer was the one who initiated the festival for Polissian female solo singers in her native village.
During the festival, which has been granted official regional status, I watched and listened to first- time performers. They were not singing in the modern sense of the word. Among them were young girls, young women, and grandmothers, who sang what sounded like arias without musical accompaniment. Most of the contestants had such rich voices, and were beautiful too, that one could only wish there were music producers in the audience. If singers like these participated, maybe the selection competition for the Eurovision finals would be harsher.
Myron Hrytsevych, a lecturer at the Zhytomyr-based Ohienko College of Culture, who headed the competition jury, explained the characteristics of solo singing to The Day. He said this kind of Polissian singing in Zhytomyr oblast is so unparalleled because the local residents are usually very musically gifted. Mostly they sing in a special “chest” voice with a unique timbre that is not found in any other regions of Ukraine. It has an exceptional range and volume.
This kind of singing is natural, not artificial. Hrytsevych explained that the winners of this competition were awarded prizes in the folk and authentic vocal nominations because authentic singing is very distinctive and best illustrates how our forefathers sang. Above all, it is an “open sound” with special lip articulation. Vira Vorobei, the winner in this nomination from Slovechne, a large village in Ovruch raion, told The Day that she was singing even before she started going to school. She would sit with her grandmothers and listen to their old folk songs. Everyone in her family sang well.
That was how she learned to handle her voice the way her grandmothers did. Vorobei collects folk songs, dances, sayings, and rituals, and then performs them on stage or at other events. But everything she sings is not taped, let alone recorded on CDs or DVDs. As she put it, she records everything in her head.
Zhytomyr’s regional history museum has tape recordings of many ancient Polissian songs. Senior research fellow Valentyna Neveska, who works in the museum’s Ethnography Division, told The Day that she and her colleagues have spent years collecting these kinds of recordings during special expeditions. The music scholar noted that the history of Polissian solo singing is at least several thousand years old. Our distant ancestors must have started singing before they learned to speak. In Polissia this kind of singing appears to have preserved its natural forms. But today many exemplars have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing. With the passage of time it is increasingly difficult to find people who can sing authentic melodies and lyrics.
How many people know what the terms “calling out” or leading a song with the first voice and “open sound” mean? Hundreds of years ago people used to sing in the fields or forests of Polissia. The folk vocal techniques formed under those conditions are difficult to reproduce today, and the number of people who want to learn these techniques is shrinking, ethnomusicological expeditions are often abandoned for lack of funds.
The need to preserve Ukrainian identity is a much discussed topic today. However, more often not, the preservation of the treasures of our people’s traditional world perception and self-expression in all their regional diversity remains the responsibility of a handful of enthusiasts. In return for token pay — or no remuneration whatsoever — they are trying to restore something without which we will turn into faceless, standardized homo sapiens-and nothing more.
