Ukraine’s War-Time Pianos and the Sounds of Resistance
On May 14, 2017, while waiting to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin was filmed playing two Soviet-era popular tunes on a grand piano: Solov’ev Sodoy’s “Evening Song,” a famous melody in St. Petersburg (the song’s lyrics refer to the city by its Soviet-era name, Leningrad), and Titon Khrennikov’s “Moscow Windows,” a song about friendship. When Putin was ridiculed for his renditions in the Western media for their technical inadequacy, he responded by saying, “It is a pity that the piano was out of tune.”
Putin has expressed political ideas through music on numerous occasions. In 2009, he participated in the hip hop “Battle for Respect” on Russian television. Since then, the government has initiated crackdowns on hip hop musicians, detaining a rapper named Husky in 2018 and canceling concerts across the country. Putin also spoke in support of Russia’s refusal to participate in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, when it was hosted in Kyiv, Ukraine, after a Crimean Tatar singer, Jamala, won the 2016 contest with her song, “1944,” a reference to May 18–20, 1944, when Soviet forces deported more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars from the Crimean Peninsula.
In light of this history of musical commentary, Putin’s remark on the Chinese president’s piano is more than a justification for his poor piano-playing skills, especially since a piano can be played just as proficiently no matter how it is tuned. More than other Western instruments, the piano in performance calls up a long history of political uses of the instrument in the Russian state. Joan Titus has shown that, in early Soviet film scores, the piano evoked narratives of Tsarist Russia as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. Over the course of the Soviet Union, pianos became affordable through mass production. The state’s music education programs helped generations of students gain piano proficiency.
At the height of the Cold War, the piano served as an important symbol through which Soviet cultural policy engaged with the West. It was, after all, on a piano that, in 1958, U.S.-born pianist Van Cliburn won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Putin thusly sees the piano as a symbol of status and prestige of geopolitical stakes. His comment on its out-of-tuneness was an attempt to save face amidst critique of his poor musicianship and even parochialism. It begs us to ask, however, what role out-of-tuneness plays in other contexts when geopolitical power is at stake: particularly in contexts of war. With this brief essay, I consider how piano intonation can be understood differently–how it evokes audience understandings of loss and devastation when musicians play out of tune instruments in contexts reduced to rubble by war.
War-Time Tunings
Roman Polansky’s 2002 film The Pianist is based on the 1946 memoirs of Polish Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, a Holocaust survivor. Szpilman had worked as a pianist on Polish Radio until the German invasion of Poland in 1939; thereafter his music-making was confined to the cafés of the Warsaw Ghetto. Saved from mass deportation to Treblinka in 1942, Szpilman survived in hiding in the increasingly destroyed Warsaw, moving from one bombed building to another. In the winter of 1944–45, Szpilman, played by Adrien Brody in the film, is discovered in an empty building by a Nazi SS officer who asks him his profession. Szpilman answers, “I am… I was a pianist.”
The SS officer takes him to a dust-covered grand piano with a visibly broken key. Polanski links the pianist’s survival to his instrument and its humanity. To save his life, Szpilman knows he must perform, the terror of the moment framed by the irony of entertainment. He must play the piano for a Nazi after hiding in silence for so long and must use his musical abilities to move a human being seemingly devoid of humanity amid the terrors of war. Sound intonation and the ability to play properly critically convey the stakes of this moment: both determine whether the officer will let him live. The pianist must “move” the listener to an emotional state that will rekindle his human spirit amid the cruelty of war. The perception of in- or out-of-tuneness in this scene for Szpilman’s historical audience (the SS officer)—along with the film’s viewing audience—is couched in anxiety and surprise. Watching, we can only hope that Szpilman, emaciated, can still play after three years of traumatic survival and that the piano will sound good.
In the film, he offers parts of Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 1). As he told it, Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne No.1 in C# Minor. At the scene’s beginning, the pitches sound unstable and his performance tentative—a strong contrast with the confident style that characterized earlier representations of his playing in the film. The piano’s notes ring hollow and flat. The film’s visual and emotional cues link the potential performance with potential failure. We worry that it will not live up to specific—professional?—standards, and we are relieved when it does. When it sounds “good,” the film helps us feel the pianist will live. The instrument’s physical condition is key to our perception of Szpilman’s safety.
All pitched instruments need tuning. Adjust a mouthpiece, turn a peg: the tuning process is as vital to performance as the player’s talent, training, and intonation. From the earliest moments of Western music education, much emphasis is placed on achieving and maintaining desired tunings, including tuning devices and apparatuses, such as humidity cases, believed to help maintain an instrument’s pitch. The whole business, one might say, of achieving and maintaining tuned pitch focuses on the attainment of an ideal and defines “good” intonation as hard, skilled work. The piano is so challenging to tune that it requires specialists who prepare the instrument for performers: piano tuners. Therefore, piano players are not always held accountable for intonation, but experienced listeners might still hear out of tune piano playing as somehow “off.”
There is a belief that being in tune is, in fact, achievable, and this establishes a frame through which sounding pitch relays meaning. In Western music, so much, in fact, is tied into the state of tuning that something that is out of tune is perceived to be incorrect, irritating, and indicative of a lack of training or talent on the musician’s part. The Ukrainian word rozstrojena, meaning un-tuned, or having lost tuning, is the same word used to describe an emotional state of disappointment. The word implies that something both being tuned or being un-tuned has a relationship to the state of one’s physical or emotional being.
Ideologies around instruments and being-in-tune shape how we watch and hear the growing number of videos uploaded from Ukrainian cities during Russia’s war in Ukraine into a broader context. They provide a broader context through which to understand the creation of these videos, too. Consider Vera Lytovchenko, a violinist performing “Nich Yaka Misiachna” (The Night is So Bright) by Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) in the basement bomb shelter in Kharkiv.
Listen to Denys Karachevtsev, a cellist performing J.S. Bach’s Fifth Cello Suite amid debris from destroyed buildings in Kharkiv.
Karachevtsev has been compared to Vedran Smailović, the so-called “Cellist of Sarajevo,” for his public performances in areas reduced to rubble. Both were recorded with the hope of being seen and heard through the act of sharing on social media. This form of war-time musical messaging has been, in part, a plea for help and a request to witness the horrors of war.
Social media videos circulated in the first weeks of Russia’s war in Ukraine have been uploaded by musicians able to transport their instruments into hiding places during the initial chaotic moments when the first bombs fell on Ukrainian cities on February 24, 2022. Pianos were left in bombed apartment buildings, as evidenced in the picture of the burned piano from the maker “Ukraina” (Україна), circulated on social media in recent weeks—the photo at the top of this essay. Professional pianist Irina Maniukina returned just hours after a bomb landed thirty feet from her home in Bila Tserkva, a city south of Kyiv. Her daughter filmed her brushing away debris and lifting the piano cover to play Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 1, on the baby grand piano before evacuating.
While piano conveys a particular poignance amid the present violence, it is not as prominent among the musical examples from Ukraine during this war. In contrast, during the Russian aggression that resulted in the annexation of Crimea in 2014, numerous pianos were wheeled onto Kyiv’s Khreschatyk Street and Independence Square during the so-called Revolution of Dignity. The instruments’ presence gave people opportunities to play, express their emotions, and rally. 2004 Eurovision winner Ruslana Lyzhychko famously played on a piano painted in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag on a flatbed truck.
At the time, the piano images from Ukraine found resonance with a musical protester in Syria. In 2015, Aeham Ahmad, the “Pianist of Yarmouk,” played an out-of-tune piano in the ruins of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus, destroyed by bombings by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Palestinian refugee used his music as resistance against the brutality of war. He wheeled his piano out daily amidst the ruins to assert survival and humanity. ISIS eventually burned Ahmad’s piano. His family’s music shop, which housed thousands of instruments—1,200 ouds, 600 guitars, and pianos—was bombed by Syrian regime forces. He now lives in Germany and in 2015 became the first person to receive the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights.
Pianos for Refugees
The outpour of videos of refugees playing on pianos left by volunteers at checkpoints across Ukraine’s western borders brings into focus the horrors of being forced to leave behind family, friends, one’s home, pets, musical instruments, and belongings. A video of a Ukrainian refugee playing “We Are the Champions” at the Medyka border crossing in Poland asks us to reflect on the sense of relief and solace music brings in times of unbearable pain and sorrow. At the same time, it forces us—at a distance from war—to consider our interests in such videos as we search the internet for release, entertainment, and curiosity. As we scroll through moments of despair, stopping, rewinding, sharing, and listening to audio and video clips, it behooves us to recognize and reflect upon our positionings as witnesses of pain and suffering, as expressed through music.
As we scroll through moments of despair, stopping, rewinding, sharing, and listening to audio and video clips, it behooves us to recognize and reflect upon our positionings as witnesses of pain and suffering, as expressed through music.
I write this essay as a pianist whose mother was born in a post-war displaced persons (DP) camp and whose father was a child refugee. I was raised in a Ukrainian-American community in Newark, New Jersey, surrounded by people traumatized by war and displacement. My childhood piano teacher, professor Taissa Bohdanska (b.1927), often shared stories of her Ukrainian family’s escape from then Poland—Lwów (now Lviv) and Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk). Her piano accompanied her journey across war-torn Europe. An Arnold Fibiger piano, made by one of the largest and most famous piano companies in interwar Poland and purchased by her father in Lwów, was sent to Cracow, where the family stayed temporarily during their escape. The instrument was then sent to Vienna, where my piano teacher settled temporarily after the Second World War and enrolled in the Conservatory of the City of Vienna in the class of professor Roland Raupensrauch.
After the war, the piano was shipped to Newark, NJ, where my piano teacher settled in 1952. She became active in the Ukrainian Music Institute of America (UMI), founded in New York by professor Roman Savytsky, her former piano teacher at the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music, where UMI’s founding faculty had taught in the 1930s. Today, the Ukrainian Music Institute of America continues as the largest and longest lived professional, non-profit music school in the Ukrainian-American diaspora. UMI has branches in numerous cities, including Philadelphia, where my mother studied piano with professor Yuriy Oransky. My sister and I took weekly lessons on my piano teacher’s Arnold Fibiger piano. We completed the twelve-year program of piano study at the UMI branch in Irvington-Newark and earned our diplomas in 1993, performing in a joint final piano recital at the Ukrainian National Home in Irvington, where UMI concerts continue to take place.
Professor Bohdanska, known for her love of Beethoven, taught her students the music of Ukrainian composers, especially those who suffered tragic fates. She compiled the Piano Album for the Young By Ukrainian Composers, which includes piano works by Vasyl Barvinsky (1888–1963), who directed the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music 1915–39. The Soviet secret police (NKVD) burned his scores in the courtyard of the Lviv Conservatory, where he worked over the course of 1939–41 and 1944–48. In 1948, Soviet authorities sentenced Barvinsky to ten years’ imprisonment in a labor camp in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was released and rehabilitated in 1958 and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to recreate his lost compositions. Because of Professor Bohdanska, my repertoire to this day features the works of Barvinsky alongside German Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned by the Nazis during WWII. Such musical practices, shared across place and time, offer a greater understanding of music’s significance in times of violence. Such are the stories of war-time pianos—such are the sounds of resistance.
About the Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable
From Roundtable curator and Musicology Now editorial team member Joan Titus:
We have witnessed significant shifts in the past several years in terms of human and civil rights across the world, and within US politics. Music and sound are inevitably involved in the expressions of positions on these rights and the search for social justice. Pussy Riot’s songs and protests against discrimination, US Americans singing on the streets during protests, social media posts about identity and music by Indigenous Americans, and the revival of past music and civil rights icons, such as Nina Simone, in current popular media all point to civil unrest, and how music and sound are integral to human expression. This Roundtable, “Sounds of Social Justice,” offers a variety of perspectives from scholars and artists on music, sound, and social justice today. Each piece, published over the course of 2021-22, allows us to contemplate how people engage the global concept of social justice through specific cultures and media.
Previous contributions to this roundtable: “The Language of The Coding,” a conversation between Neil Verma and Yvette Janine Jackson, and “Unsettling Peter Pan,” an essay by Victoria Lindsay Levine. For more information about music and the war in Ukraine please see, “Music from Ukraine: A Collaborative Portrait Gallery in March 2022.”
