| Dear Friends, We are less than one month away from the 2026 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival! We can’t wait to welcome you back to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music for a new season of music. Today, we are sharing a little bit about this year’s Composer-in-Residence: Alla Zahaykevych. An acclaimed composer, IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) alumna, and pioneer of Ukrainian electroacoustic music, Zahaykevych has been a central figure in shaping Ukraine’s contemporary sound world. Her works appear across all three concerts, embodying the spirit of Mosaics through her deep engagement with cultural hybridity, technology, and tradition. Hear her music on each of this year’s concerts and read on to learn more about her work. |
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Can you tell us about your pieces in this years UCMF? This year, three of my works will be performed at UCMF: A string quartet from 2009, Rituel for voice and electronics (2024), and Vela invicti (2025).The string quartet was written for the renowned Ukrainian quartet Collegium. In this work, I wanted to create sort of sensitive space of playing, something almost “impossible in real life,” a mutual understanding and language between musicians. Sort of like contemplating strange landscapes… sensitively listening to one another and to the surrounding space.Rituel for voice and electronics was written for a Ukrainian singer in Paris, Yaryna Turianska. I wanted to compose a piece of a certain “action,” similar to rituals. It is not meant to recreate a ritual, but to express a similar “naïve” confidence that something will change. The piece is quite dramatic and requires the singer to master both academic and folk vocal techniques. The text is a fragment from Oleh Lysheha’s mystery play Friend Li Bo, Brother Du Fu.Vela invicti for ensemble and electronics is a work of wartime. It was inspired by Volodymyr Yermolenko’s novel Ocean Catcher. During 2024–2025, I worked on an electroacoustic cycle Songs of Odysseus. The path of Odysseus, a warrior and a traveler, his dangerous journeys, the need to make choices, the longing for home – all became very close to me. Vela invicti is such a peculiar landscape—one of Odysseus’s many sea voyages. In this version, of course, he sails the Black Sea. The score in fact incorporates a sonogram of the recording of the Black Sea from Oleh Sanin’s film Mamay, for which I composed music in 2003. |
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Are there any particular sounds or textures that you are especially drawn to at the moment? It’s hard to say if there are specific sounds but I really like working with the voice. It’s an infinitely rich material, both acoustically and in working with electronic means. I really like combining noises and the human voice—exploring the richness of its timbral possibilities. In the work “Rituel,” for example, I tried to achieve a special effect of the “singing of the sea,” using various filtering of sounds of the sea and the voice. |
Given your extensive knowledge in different musical practices, are there any that feel central to your creative identity? Working simultaneously on instrumental and electroacoustic compositions, music for film and theatre, creates a sense of “interpenetration” or “germination” of one genre or practice growing into another. In electronic music, a certain “orchestral” logic can be felt, in instrumental, electronic. Perhaps this very possibility of the integration of different musical practices growing into one another is what feels important to me now. For example, the opera “Vyshyvanyi,” staged at the Kharkiv Opera House in 2021, is a work for soloists, choir, orchestra, and electronics. |
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Being a part of the legendary ethnographic ensemble Drevo, did this type of authentic folk singing shape your compositional language? And how did your studies at IRCAM influence you creatively? It so happened that my first folklore expedition, in 1986 to the Chornobyl region shaped my perception of folklore as a very “radical” culture. A closed culture—unlike European musical culture—that sounds more “avant-garde,” almost “wild.” This understanding of folklore has remained with me to this day. The preservation of folk timbre and the authentic folk materials is very important to me. IRCAM came into my life because of my interest in French spectral music. I applied there with orchestral works, but electroacoustic music for me is a kind of evolutionary continuation of the sonoristic thinking of 20th-century European orchestral music. Studying musique concrète, musique acousmatique, and algorithmic composition were the base of finding my own path. Thanks to this education, I was able to organize the first Electroacoustic Music Studio in Ukraine at the Kyiv Conservatory and launch the international concert projects “Electroacoustics” and “EM-visia”.  Before we end this interview, what do you hope people will take with them after hearing your compositions? Personally, I am fascinated by the possibility of experiencing the act of creation through new music. The act of creating a special world, like a new kind of movie with a new language. Concentrative listening, moving through an unfamiliar landscape. Perhaps (surely) the music of wartime carries something else in itself. Our new experience of artistic reflection on resistance and action. |
| Hear Alla’s music on March 19, 20, and 21 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music. |
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The 2026 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival – Meet our Composer-in-Residence, Alla Zahaykevych.
