By Olena DIACHKOVA
Musicologist Nina Herasymova-Persydska can without doubt be called a coauthor
of the long dead musicians whose music she restores.
320 years ago, The Grammar of Musical Singing by the most famous
Ukrainian Baroque composer Mykola Diletsky, was completed in Moscow. This
Grammar is one of the most valuable monuments of the Slavic culture.
In olden times, it was the principal manual for training musicians in the
Slavic countries. However, we would have never known the music of Ukrainian
Baroque performed by singing musicians but for the diligence and painstaking
archival work great musicologist and Academician Nina Herasymova-Persydska.
Q.: Some of your students still remember how in polyphony classes
you, among other things, would point out: "Most important for you is to
find your niche, what you will attend to. Only this can now save you."
How did you find your niche?
A.: At the time when I was starting to work on concert scores,
such music simply did not exist. There were no concert scores which had
ever been played, sung, or in general merited the slightest attention.
But I very much wanted to make this old music a resounding music.
Here such music began being played only recently. It is a great loss
to our culture that for a long time we had no chance to hear the music
of Middle Ages or that of the West-European and Ukrainian baroque. However,
even now it is almost impossible to hear a genuine performance in our concert
halls. Our ensembles and soloists play the way they feel and think. They
do their best, but they lack special training.
Before old music is published, before it is performed and discussed
by the people at large, one cannot say that it exists. Now interest in
such music is being slowly revived. Many people sing it and record on CDs.
Gradually, I fell into the category of those anonymous authors whose music
I restored. They never mention my name among the soloists who worked on
the notes I had restored. Though restoring notes is a rather labor-intensive
process. In fact, you create music together with the composer, including
reconstruction of the texture and restoration of lacunae. Of course, you
can do it only if you are able to hear a great deal. To do this type of
work, theoretical knowledge is not enough. You have to know the stylistics
of this music by ear. Only then something interesting can be created. For
a scholar, especially important is the moment when he or she suddenly finds
a missing fragment after the reconstruction was finished. In my case, the
fragments found afterwards always coincided with what I had written, if
not a hundred percent, then ninety-six.
Q.: Once you mentioned that under socialism noblewomen wash floors
and never complained about their fate. They viewed their current status
as something natural, because their upbringing made them face everything
directly and combined high exactness and readiness to work. How do you
see the psychological portrait of an intellectual?
A.: It's hard for me to generalize, because I know of a very
limited circle of people. I have the impression that the current situation
has given the creative intelligentsia - I mean the intelligentsia who are
interested in something or have minds that are alive - great intellectual
freedom. We have more willing to take the initiative, more new ideas are
emerging, and all this obviously is because those ideas can somehow be
put into effect or at least come close to realization. Even the possibility
to see the accomplishment of one's plans is very important. Did we have
so many conferences ten or fifteen years ago? I know of culturati and philologists
who work intensely and with enthusiasm. I think that in spite of everything
a certain stratum of the intelligentsia have a feel for the prospects and
possibilities for development.
Considering not only my generation, but the one ten or fifteen years
younger, it should be said that many things we now do are the result of
our upbringing. We are enthusiasts. And I remember the former generation
- they were enthusiasts even more, endowed with extraordinary unselfishness.
That was a lifestyle: not a Russian or Ukrainian one, but that of the area
which can now be called the Soviet Union, Russia, or a part of Eastern
Europe. And if we now are doing something that interests us greatly and
hope that something will come of it, it is only because we rely on someone
else's enthusiasm.






