On 1 March, 19:00, at Radialsystem, Ensemble KNM Berlin, in partnership with Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, presents a concert of new music from Ukraine, Korea, Taiwan, and the UK at Radialsystem. The concert will be preceded by Mykhailo Chedryk’s lecture about Kyiv Avant-Garde.

“The Influences of ‘68” connects the year 2014, the high point of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, to the social upheavals of 1968, which contributed significantly to democratization in Western Europe. Does 2014 have a similar significance for Ukrainian music practice as 1968 did for Western Europe? Can the music scene in Ukraine draw on experiences from that time? The concert will place the work of the Kyiv Avant-garde group of the 1960s in the context of Western European music practice charged with minimalism, Fluxus, and happenings, while also presenting three younger composers from Ukraine, Korea, and Taiwan whose works carry the spirit of that time into the present.

Mykhailo Chedryk, composer and member of Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, will open the evening with a lecture “Kyiv Avant-Garde: Seeking Interaction with the World.”

While members of the Kyiv Avant-garde were never overtly political, their interest in Western music was seen not only as a revolt against the USSR’s dominant socialist realism doctrine. By exploring purely artistic concepts and abstract ideas, the young Kyiv composers were also challenging a long Russian musical tradition with its Narodnik leanings imposed on Ukrainian composers who were expected to create folk-inspired music accessible to the masses. Creating essentially urban, intellectual music, Kyiv Avant-garde contributed to decolonizing the Ukrainian classical scene and restoring its links with the European tradition. That didn’t go unpunished in the climate of post-1968 Soviet repressions: by 1970, most representatives of the Kyiv Avant-garde were ousted from the Union of Composers, which at the time equaled professional death and signified the group’s end.

Cut short before reaching its full potential, the Kyiv Avant-garde largely remains a terra incognita outside of Ukraine’s professional music circles, making its presentation by Ensemble KNM Berlin all the more timely and valuable. Back home, the legacy of Kyiv Avant-garde lives on, bridging a gap between the radical ideas of the 1920s and the free experiments of post-1991 Ukrainian composers. Among them, Alla Zagaykevych—a prolific composer, influential educator, and festival organizer—plays an important role. Drawing from Ukrainian folk tradition and all Western avant-gardes, including the Kyiv one, Zagaykevych has raised a generation of Ukrainian composers who started gaining prominence after 2014 and have been reintegrating Ukrainian classical music into the European and larger Western space where it has always belonged. 

KNM Berlin has earned an international reputation with repeated guest appearances at important music festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, MaerzMusik in Berlin, ars musica in Brussels, Festival d’Automne in Paris, and Wien Modern in Vienna, as well as with its own productions such as HouseMusik or KNM New Music Spa. Concert tours have taken the ensemble to the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Carnegie Hall in New York, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and the National Concert Hall in Taipei. 

KNM’s discography comprises more than 18 CDs to date; the KNM was awarded the German Record Critics’ Award in 2021 as well as in March 2009 and 2010 for its collaboration with the composer Beat Furrer.