Month: September 2012


  • Art Music in Kiev

    Upon arriving in Kiev, Maria and I discovered to our great joy that one can see an opera here for as little as $1.25 or as much as $25. Without losing any time, we booked superb tickets to see several Ukrainian works, which are very hard to find in Canada. The highlight of our three-day…

  • Sounds of Kiev: Main train station

    This recording was taken in the main hall of the beautiful passenger train station in Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Flatten your throat and sing

    “Flatten your throat and send a nasty sound into your teeth.” That’s roughly what we were trying to do in the student folk ensemble led by the well-known Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov. This week I was very lucky to sit in on a lecture on the modal organization of Ukrainian folksong given by professor Yefremov…

  • Ukraine: first days

    Achievements to date: learning how to use a cell phone with Russian menus and making a whole THREE phone calls to strangers (1 in Russian, 2 in Ukrainian). My sister and I left Canada last Friday. Two days and several long layovers later, we have finally arrived in Kiev. I was disappointed to discover that…