Traditional Music from the Ukraine Traditional Ukrainian music is predominantly heterophonic: songs are distributed among different voice parts, with one leading voice, mostly in a middle register. The lead singer (zaspivoovach) determines the course of the melody and the other voices come in later. This heterophonic group singing is often embellished by an independent voice in a very high register (vyvodtshyk). The principle of heterophony allows the principal voice much space for improvisation, continuous variation and embellishment. It has also an effect on the lyrics, insofar as single words or phrases are lengthened with vocalisms or enlarged with additional syllables. There is a rich repertoire of many famous Cossack songs and dance traditions. This music has its roots in a centuries old oral tradition of bylina (epics, heroic narrative poetry) and dumas, long lyrical ballads glorifying the exploits of the Cossacks. Ukraine The present-day Ukraine is a state in the size of France with over 50 million inhabitants. Wide parts belong to the eastern European lowland. Big rivers like the Volga, the Don, the Dnepr and the Dniester flow through this land and some of them into the Black Sea. Quite early, they became very important trade routes to the North and to Central Europe. In the Ukraine, there are no natural borders except the Carpathian mountains in the west and the Prypjat marshland in the northwest, which were areas of both frequent military conflict and cultural transmission. The word Ukraine means border area, and, as the history shows, the area came under the influence of different cultural areas and reigns. On the edge of the steppes north of the Black Sea, the borders between the sedentary societies of the Christian Slavs and the nomadic tribes of Islamic Tartars were fluid. Later, northwestern and central Ukraine became an arena of expansion for a new power that had arisen in the 13th century, the grand duchy of Lithuania. Then the greater part of the Ukrainian territories was detached from Lithuania and annexed directly to the kingdom of Poland. Then followed the Russian empire, the Habsburg empire and, in the 20th Century, again Poland and the Soviet Union. The Ukraine was only autonomous during the Kievan empire (Kievan Rus) from the 10th till the 13th century; following that it acted as the principality Galicia-Volhynia in the 13th and 14th centuries, as the Hetmanate (hetman or ataman = commander in chief) of the Dnepr Cossacks in the 17th century and in 1918, and finally from 1918 to 1920, as the Ukrainian People's Republic. - map sketch Historical map of the Ukraine History The Black Sea coast was for centuries in the sphere of contemporary Mediterranean powers. Beginning in the 7th - 6th centuries BC, numerous Greek colonies were founded on the coast of the Black Sea, in the Crimea and along the Sea of Azov. Later, they came under the Roman Empire. During the 1st millennium BC, the open steppe was occupied successively by the Cimmerians, the Scythians and the Sarmatians, all nomadic peoples of Iranian stock. In several successive waves, nomadic horseman from Central Asia used this natural gateway (the hinterland steppes) to invade Europe. The mixed forest-steppe and the forest belt, linked by waterways to northern and central Europe, became the homeland of a sedentary agricultural population. Under the impact of Germanic migrations in the 5th and the 6th centuries, Slavic tribes moved from their primordial homeland north of the Carpathians. The East Slavs occupied the forest and the forest-steppe region in today's western and north-central Ukraine. Then they expanded further to southern Belarus and to the northeast into territories of the future Russian state centred on Moscow. The East Slavs practiced agriculture and animal husbandry and became engaged in domestic industries such as cloth making and ceramics. They built fortified settlements like Kiev on the right bank of the Dnepr River. A period of great migrations began with the descent of the Goths from the Baltic region about AD 200. They displaced the Sarmatians, but their own power was broken about 375 by the invading Huns from the east, who were followed in the 5th - 6th centuries by the Bulgars and Avars. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Ukrainian steppe formed part of the Turkic Khazar kaganate, a mercantile empire centred on the lower Volga River (Novogorod). In the late 9th century followed the Magyars (Hungarians) and in the 10th and the 11th century the Pechenegs and Cumans (nomadic Turkic people). The Cumans stayed until the Mongol Invasion in 1237. The first people, who controlled the area for a longer period (from AD 882 until the late 10th century), were the Varangians (Norsemen) known as the Rus. They were a people of merchants and warriors, who controlled the trade along the Dnepr route from the Baltic to Byzantium, on which Kiev was strategically sited. From their ranks came the progenitors of the Kievan princes. The so-called Kievan Rus lived in an area stretching from the Baltic to the Volga in the West and the Danube in the South. Kiev reached its apogee in the reigns of Volodymyr the Great, who adopted Christianity as the religion of his realm. The patriarch of Constantinople appointed a metropolitan in Kiev and so Kievan Rus entered the orbit of Byzantine influence that lasted for a long period. By 1520 though, the whole coast of the Black Sea was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The Cossacks The Cossackdom is one of the most original and significant appearances of Russian history. In the 16th century, Cossack communities developed in the southern area, in the region of Moscow, in Belarus and the Ukraine. They accomplished a great deal for Russia with their colonization of conquered territories and the defence of the same. They also influenced the state's interior law-and-order and the historical evolution of the country. Sometimes, the Cossacks are considered to be the direct descendants of Non-Slavic tribes (Khazars, Cossogens, Tcherkesses, a.o.), who settled in some of the areas of southern Russia in the period of the disintegration. This conclusion is only based on the origin of the word "Cossack" (from the Turkic kazak, or "free man", also meaning outlaw, adventurer or freebooter). The Tartars hereby described a minor armed force division or single horsemen or any armed units that were independent from the Khan (the commander of the Tartars). Ethnically though, the Cossacks are Ukrainians, despite their name. The Cossackdom, a new martial society, was beginning to evolve in Ukraine's southern steppe frontier in the 15th century. The Cossacks developed a military organization of a peculiarly democratic kind, with a general assembly as the supreme authority and elected officers, including the commander in chief, or hetman. Thus, they were able to protect the borderlines against the constant danger of attacks by the Tartar's Golden Hordes with war strategies the Polish-Lithuanian states were lacking. The Cossacks didn't only defend Ukraine's frontiers population from Tartar incursions, but conducted their own campaigns into Crimean territory and, in their flotillas of light craft, even raided Turkish coastal cities in Anatolia. The Polish government found the Cossacks a useful fighting force in wars with the Tartars, Turks and Muscovites, but in peacetime viewed them as a dangerously volatile element. Attempts to control them institutionally created serious discontent among the Cossacks, who increasingly perceived themselves as forming a distinct estate with inherent rights and liberties. Sporadically over a half century, starting in 1591, the Cossacks rose up in revolts that were put down only with great difficulty. The structures of all ancient Cossack communities were equal. The Don-Cossacks lived in family-like reinforced settlements on the river Don and its tributaries Medveditsa, Khoper, Donets and Sherebets. The property of land was of common ownership. Apart from their military campaigns they pursued, most of all, fishing and hunting. When they started to cultivate the fields in the Don area in the 17th century, the Supreme Command decided to interdict any such cultivation on penalty. The grain supplies were partly distributed by the government, and partly acquired by trading in fish as well as Turkish and Tartar merchandise with the inhabitants of the Russian neighbourhood areas. The administration of the troupes was in the hands of the ataman or hetman (commander in chief), who, like his assistant, the yessaul (captain) and one official military writer, who was responsible for the correspondence, was elected by the Cossacks' Common Legislative Assembly, (krug, literally "circle"), and could be removed from office at any time. All significant questions were decided by the assembly. The Hetman and his assistant were only the executors of the intentions of the assembly. Among the mutual responsibilities of the Hetman and the assembly were all affairs of the armed forces as well as court procedures. Severe crimes, especially political ones, were sentenced with death penalty by drowning, officially described as "setting into the water". Within all Cossack settlements, a proper supreme assembly was elected, and the chosen eldest were responsible for the interior affairs of the community. During military campaigns, these democratic institutions were replaced by the hetman s despotic rules. But he was obliged to give a report upon his activities during a battle, after returning home. You can find more information about traditional songs of the Cossacks in the albums with the Ensemble Pesnokhorki from Barnaul, Siberia / Russia - Face Music: FM 50017 and FM 50019. Language and Religion The Ukrainian language belongs, like Russian and Belo Russian, to the family of the East Slavic languages. Written documents only exist since Christianity had been adopted and Kiev had become the first Christian centre in the eastern Slavic area in AD 998. The oldest documents are transcriptions of church texts, which in the 9th century, the Slavic apostles Kyrill and Method had transcribed into the south Slavic dialect of the Thessalonica area. They created for this purpose an alphabet similar to Greek and called it Kyrilliza. These texts, also known as old Bulgarian or old Slavonic texts, are the basis of the current Church language of all orthodox Slavs, Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, Ukrainians etc.. Thanks to the political separation from Northern Russia and the affiliation to the Lithuanian grand duchy and later to the kingdom of Poland, Ukrainian appears as a language of its own in the 14th century.