Olga Amelkina-Vera’s The Heaven’s Hundred
We have been here before. And yet . . .
The history of Russia’s oppression of the people of Ukraine – of their political autonomy, their freedom, and their artistic voice – is long and ugly, intense and inspiring. Ukraine’s history, and its language, are beautiful and distinguished – the former a thousand-year celebration of cultural autonomy and the latter a melodious Slavic tongue that, while related to other Slavic languages, is unique, with its own grammar, pronunciations, and vocabulary, so different from the language of its Russian neighbors that it is difficult for them to understand (so they have historically repeatedly attempted to suppress it). That autonomy, together with material resources, has made Ukraine a target of other empires since 1240; and those imperialist efforts to co-opt and plunder Ukrainian identity have continually led to temporary imperialist successes followed by renewed affirmations of what it means to be Ukrainian, to be Ukraine.
To name two examples: the mid-nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement led Russian Tsar Alexander II (fl. 1855-81), who inherited rule of Ukraine, to issue the secret decree known as the Ems Ukaz, which forbade the use of the Ukrainian language and the importing of Ukrainian publications, among other things – but that attempt at suppression had the opposite effect, for the Ukrainian people responded with a powerful surge of Ukrainian literature, poetry, drama, visual art, and music (Mykola Lysenko is one well-known exponent of that last-named artistic flowering). And of course modern readers all know of Vladimir Putin’s cruel, unprovoked, and illegal ongoing war against the people of Ukraine – an invasion that the despot no doubt expected to last only weeks or months, but that is now poised to pass into its second year, with the proud people of Ukraine, allied with the majority of the community of nations, still fighting fiercely to defy Putin’s tyranny.
And then – outside the usable experience and memory of some younger readers, including my own students – there was the Revolution of Dignity (Ukrainian: Революція гідності, romanized: Revoliutsiia hidnosti) of 2014, also known as the Maidan Revolution – when Ukraine’s Russian-puppet president, Viktor Yanukovych, suddenly opted to align Ukraine economically with Russia and Eurasia rather than entering into a free-trade agreement with the European Union. The Ukrainian people, whose discontent with the political corruption and human-rights abuses of the Yanukovych regime had long been simmering, rose up in protest – a series of protests that cost about one hundred Ukrainian lives, overthrew the regime, and launched the Russo-Ukrainian War, of which Putin’s 2021 invasion is only one recent chapter.
So yes, we’ve been here before. And yet . . .
And yet we have not. For that 2014 Revolution of Dignity also inspired an important, and deeply moving, musical affirmation of those one hundred Ukrainian lives tragically taken as the Ukrainian people resisted that is powerful and, in my own experience, without precedent. That affirmation, Belarusian-American composer and guitarist Olga Amelkina-Vera’s composition The Heaven’s Hundred, performed by U.S. guitarist Matt Palmer, is but one of twenty beautiful and wonderfully varied works on the album Ka Ao: Works for Guitar.
I asked Dr. Amelkina-Vera – who, I might note with great professorial pride, is a former student of mine – about the work. Here’s what she wrote:
Here is a short info clip on Ka Ao for those who would like an overview of the album. But what I think is so important here is not only that The Heaven’s Hundred is a brilliant and virtuosic piece of descriptive music that bravely acknowledges – owns – the social work and moral imperatives that are the province of music and all the arts, but also, in musical terms, does precisely what the people of Ukraine have repeatedly done over the last ten centuries: it shows us, in tones and technique, in voice and style and spirit, what courage is.
I encourage you to check out The Heaven’s Hundred and all the other remarkable compositions (including Étoiles par Grand Vent, one of my other favorites) on Ka Ao. It will remind you of music’s capacity for beauty in giving voice to courage and much, much more. (The Heaven’s Hundred is on the ballot for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in this year’s Grammy Awards.)
Ka Ao: Works for Guitar is available on all streaming platforms and as physical media from Frameworks Records.
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