Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them—excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though (or especially because) it was not sanctioned by the state. Imagine that you and your friends, your fellow students and folk-song collectors, gathered in secret to sing the suppressed repertoires and learn the techniques of village vocality, with its grain and improvisational drift. Imagine that the clandestine chorus kicked off what would eventually become a movement to recuperate unruly singing from the homogenization machine of the Soviet state. Imagine that 30, 40, 50 years later this kind of singing would come to signify defiance, become known as a postcolonial music, a tactic of imperial refusal.
In modern Ukraine, this style is commonly referred to as avtentyka, literally “authentic” music. It is a style and a cultural movement that, at its most dynamic, embraces the obvious paradox of studied authenticity, which claims roots in pre-Christianity but encompasses changes introduced over the millennium that followed. In 21st-century wartime Kyiv, avtentyka groups have staged dance parties in Metro stations and study groups in museums. Today’s “authentic” Ukrainian folk is part of a cultural revival rooted in the rejection of Putinist authoritarianism, and in the older dream of a music and a life uncorrupted by state power.
On Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), a new album first presented as a performance at last year’s Unsound festival in Krakow, Ukrainian artists Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko repurpose this modern-authentic Ukrainian voice to interpret medieval plainchant: the religious songs of the German nun, mystic visionary, and idiosyncratic composer Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179). The mesmerizing two-track album presents two of Hildegard’s compositions, “O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti” (“O Fire of the Spirit and Defender”) and “O Tu Suavissima Virga” (“O Sweetest Branch”), in unhurried arrangements; each track approaches 20 minutes in length. While Hildegard’s melodies and Latin text are faithfully reproduced, the songs are otherwise unconstrained, allowed to meander and soar, unfolding through the interplay of generative patches and improvised vocalizations. Veering sharply away from the typical contemplative renditions of Hildegard’s devotional songs, Hildegard sets up a confrontation between the immensity of spiritual passion and the elemental power of sound, expressed through the searing authentic-modern voice of Saienko and the mutable, enveloping textures of Heinali’s synthesizer.
Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali, is a sound artist and composer who has previously pushed the boundaries of Western musical tradition by adapting late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony for modular synthesizer. His previous albums, including Kyiv Eternal (2023) and Madrigals (2020), have earned him substantial critical praise. Adriana-Yaroslava (Yasia) Saienko arrived to Ukrainian folk song via the theater, following in the footsteps of some of Ukraine’s foremost musical innovators—including the actor-singers Uliana Horbachevska, Mariana Sadovska, and Jura Josyfovych—who thrive on the edge of tradition and experimentalism.
Both tracks on Hildegard center the primal combination of voice and drone. This simple and seductive pairing morphs in both its historical and technological associations, alternately evoking the thin sound of a sine wave and a blaring, reedy zurna, the high-church pipe organ and the folk lira (the hurdy-gurdy used by pre-modern Ukrainian bards), a pulsating buzzsaw and the noise of a helicopter passing overhead. The voice moves too, contracting from the space of a resonant cathedral (the album was recorded in the Cistercian Abbey of Sylvanès) to, in the opening of “O Tu Suavissima Virga,” a bone-dry close-miked sound: Hildegard’s devotional songs as an intimate lullaby. As performed by some ensembles, Hildegard’s music can embody meditative restraint, but when Saienko unleashes the full-throated avtentyka sound, her pitch bending with intensity, she reveals a spirit of wildness in the music.
The formula—Hildegard von Bingen’s compositions plus Ukrainian folk voice plus modular synth—may seem less than intuitive at first, but there’s a mutually reinforcing strangeness here between the passions of the medieval Christian saint, the haunting search for authenticity in the human voice, and the meticulous electronic generation of sounds that, at times, evoke acoustic instruments. The artists explain that they adapt Hildegard not in the service of a faithful reconstruction of historical performance practices but as a “distant mirror” that enables the Ukrainian artists to process and transcend their wartime experiences.
Hildegard’s religious visions were famously accompanied by disabling flashes of light (today theorized by some as symptoms of migraines). The artists, here, connect these painful visions to the explosive force of the missile that fell near Heinali’s studio in Kyiv after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. The analogy is made explicit in the digital bonus track, which adapts a folk song once collected in the villages of Western Polissia by some of the student singers from the Kyiv Conservatory who sought the modern-authentic voice in the waning years of the USSR. On a 1990 cassette recording, now digitized, ethnomusicologist Iryna Klymenko sings the song without accompaniment: “Green oak tree, why did your leaves rustle so early?” In the original, a vignette of rural life unfolds. In this 2025 reimagination, Saienko suggests that the early morning noise was not the wind, but a sound of war, the inhuman disturbance and destructive flare of missile fire. In Hildegard, Heinali and Saienko provoke us to linger at the intersection of the medieval and the modern, the elemental and the eternal; of the rural voice, the traumatic experience, and the mystical vision.
