Anna Pidgorna

Composer | Vocalist | Visual Artist

Category: Ukraine

  • Teach your daughters

    I can finally share the live recording of Teach your daughters, which I premiered with Katha Zinn and Illya Filshtinskiy from aTonalHits on a Princeton Sound Kitchen Concert on March 1. Because of the difficulty of the subject matter, this piece took a very long time to take shape. This piece for voice, violin and prepared piano is…

  • Two concerts and a journal

    It seems that I just got back from my last four-week-long trip to Europe (my suitcase was still in the middle of my bedroom until very recently), and already I’m getting ready to fly off for another five weeks. While the first trip was purely pleasure, this one has some work sprinkled in. After a…

  • Soundstreams post-mortem

    It’s been about a month since I returned from Toronto and I’m just waking up from my post-masters hibernation. I’ve done no composing since the Soundstreams workshop, and after deadening my brain with hundred-year-old dust and pain fumes at a heritage house reno over the last four weeks, I feel ready to jump back into…

  • A humble composer’s tribute to Stalin

    For me, one of the most fascinating subjects in music history is the life and work of composers in the Soviet Union. It is close to my family history and always forces me to imagine my life had I been born 60 years earlier. When I was in Ukraine last fall, my grandfather showed me…

  • Ukrainian Polesia: Zalav’ja

    After spending three nights in Perebrody, we were off to our second destination, Zalav’ja. Upon arrival, our instructions were to find a particular store and ask for Galja. This Galja would take care of everything. And she did. Galja turned out to be a somewhat hung-over, but incredibly energetic businesswoman who runs a successful store/bar…

  • Ukrainian Polesia: first dip in Perebrody

    Dear Lord, what can I say about Northwestern Ukraine…if vodka doesn’t kill you, diabetes will. In Polesia, the swampy land that was under Polish control until 1939, vodka flows freely from dawn to dusk, and tea is so sweet it should really be classified as syrup. Our first trip to this hauntingly beautiful region of…

  • Travel back in time

    In the last days of September, Maria and I visited two villages in the Bobrovyts’kyi district of Chernihivs’ka region to collect songs, stories and memories. A bus ride shaky enough to break teeth or induce labour took us to Kozats’ke (Козацьке), where a welcoming party of babushka-clad old ladies was awaiting us by the village…

  • 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…