Anonymous Coauthor Spanning Ages

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.