Registration information forthcoming.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Department of Music for a colloquium with Professor Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College).
Across the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, Palaces of Pioneers provided after-school programs for children aged 9–14, aiming to cultivate ideal future Soviet citizens who would reproduce the revolutionary ideals associated with Lenin. Among the most ideologically charged activities were the drum and bugle corps, which were considered “ritual ensembles,” performing at events that celebrated the Soviet state: parades, visits of foreign dignitaries, and commemorative events like Lenin’s birthday. At the postwar Kyiv Palace of Pioneers—the central Pioneer Palace of Soviet Ukraine—this ensemble became a particularly striking site of gendered performance. Girls were trained as drummers and boys as buglers, producing a choreographed spectacle that conflated strict musical and gendered roles. By the 1970s, the ensemble further intensified this effect by recruiting twins and triplets, whose matching bodies amplified the impression of uniformity and discipline.
Maria Sonevytsky interprets the postwar Kyivan Pioneer fanfare ensemble to illuminate the gendered construction of Soviet childhood and its intersection with forms of musical discipline. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, she traces how practices surrounding bodily presentation, musical skill, and ideologically framed performance attempted to condition children for a future of disciplined happiness—an affective reward tied to compliance and musical competence, but also to rigidly organized gender roles. This study reveals how the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers sought to mold the idealized citizen-child as not only a skilled and joyful participant in state rituals, but as an agent of social reproduction, offering clues as to how the future of Soviet Communism was being imagined in postwar Ukraine.
Maria Sonevytsky is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College. She is the author of the books “Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine” (2019), “Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi” (2023), and a forthcoming book on children’s musical culture at the Soviet-era Kyiv Palace of Pioneers. Sonevytsky has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters on subjects ranging from post-Chernobyl folklore revivals and “eco-nationalism” in Ukraine, to Indigenous musical activism in Crimea, to the ambivalent feminist politics of Ukrainian Eurovision competitors. She performs diverse village repertoires from Ukraine in experimental arrangements with her trio Zozulka.
Image from the KPDU Archive.
