‘Melodies of Ukraine’ charity concert to showcase ‘treasured’ national instrument
PROVIDENCE – About 20 experienced “bandurists” will perform in Providence this Saturday in a charity concert benefiting the Ukrainian war effort.
The Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America, founded in 2014, pulls together musicians of Ukraine’s national instrument – the bandura – from cities around the U.S. and Canada. Two back-to-back concerts in Providence and Boston will raise funds for a U.S.-based nonprofit that partners with Ukrainian aid organizations.
“We’re hoping to have non-Ukrainians come,” said Kathryn Sos-Hayda, a volunteer researcher at the Woonsocket Museum of Work & Culture who studies the Ukrainian diaspora in northern Rhode Island. “That’s the goal, to share this instrument and treasure of Ukrainian culture with a broader audience.”
The bandura itself resembles a cross between a lute and a harp, and it has a long history as the “voice and soul” of Ukraine. Modern banduras have between 55 and 64 strings and a range of four to five octaves. Some models have a mechanism that allows the player to change keys, like a harp.
The instrument’s ancestor, the kobza, accompanied historical and religious ballads, often with lyrics written by Taras Shevchenko, a famous Ukrainian poet who composed works during the mid-19th century. Blind male minstrels called “kobzari” would travel the country performing the music, and the early 20th century saw the first bandura ensembles in Ukraine.
Because of the instrument’s strong ties to Ukrainian culture, bandurists were persecuted under Joseph Stalin’s reign of the Society Union. The bandura and the traditional folk music written for the instrument came to North American after World War 2 when a group of 17 bandurists emigrated to Detroit, Michigan and reestablished the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus.
President of the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America Irene Kuzma’s father was one of those original members who settled in Detroit.
“My involvement in bandura goes back to my childhood,” she said. “It is ingrained. My father actually played bandura for my mother as she was in labor with me.”
The Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus led the charge in
preserving the instrument and the music in the U.S., touring internationally and establishing summer music camps in the U.S. to teach first-generation Ukrainian-Americans the instrument. Kuzma grew up attending and even teaching at these camps, but because early bandura ensembles in Ukraine were all male, the camps and ensembles tended to be that way too.
“Then there’s me, the girl, and I had three girls,” Kuzma said. “All of us were like, ‘How come we don’t have a group?’”
In 2014, with the help of some seed money from the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus, Kuzma founded the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America with childhood friends she had met in bandura camps.
The ensemble now has about 20 members, including about half who are original members from 2014, and two conductors. There are members from up and down the east coast, the tristate area, the Midwest and Toronto. Three members are recent arrivals to North America from Ukraine, including the group’s youngest member, a 16-year-old who was in music school in Ukraine and will be performing live with the ensemble for the first time this weekend.
“We try and gather, and it is definitely a love,” Kuzma said. “We all love this instrument and we love to sing and we love being together.”
Every member plays bandura and sings, and the group has worked to find its own unique sound by blending the traditional and folk styles of the instrument and finding ways to modernize the compositions. Since members come from different music educational backgrounds, blending the styles has been a feature of the ensemble since its inception.
“We come from all over and we each learn something different and in different ways,” Kuzma said. “We’re more experimental, and creating this sound and the meaning and the depth.”
When Russia launched its most recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kuzma said every member of the ensemble went into “what-can-I-do mode,” and in the last two years, every member has done some kind of charity performance to help the war effort.
Funds raised at the Providence concert will go to the Ukrainian Charitable Platform, a relatively new U.S.based nonprofit founded by Tania Vitvitsky.
“The needs in Ukraine are enormous because of the war,” Vitvitsky said. “The closer you get to the frontline, it gets worse.”
Vitvitsky’s nonprofit partners with Ukrainian organizations, especially the Ukrainian Education Platform, a social-educational nonprofit that helps internally displaced mothers and children, and Eleos-Ukraine, which is based in the capital city Kyiv and provides resources and support to sexual assault victims and humanitarian aid to residents in the Kherson region.
“These are organizations that are on the ground. They’ve been around for a while,” Vitvitsky said. “They do very good work and they work with the local communities.”
Vitvitsky said she founded the Ukrainian Charitable Platform in part to make facilitating donations from the U.S. easier. In her experience visiting the country since 2022, “money goes a much longer way in Ukraine” and it makes more sense to send money than ship certain supplies, she said.
“The stores are stocked.
When you have a partner and you can send them money, they can buy stuff, which helps the local economy,” she said. “Not only are they trying to fight an enemy, they’re working on getting into the European Union. Any kind of economic help is very, very valuable.”
This is the Ukrainian Charitable Platform’s first partnership with the Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America for a charity concert, but given the bandura’s significance in the country’s history and culture, Vitvitsky said it’s a “natural collaboration.”
Though the funds raised from the performance will obviously go a long way, Kuzma said the charity performances are also about making the case for preserving the bandura and the culture surrounding it.
“Since the war, it’s meant a lot more to us,” she said. “It really is an instrument that brings hope and just shows we all want the same thing. We want peace. It has a future. Bandura has a future, and hopefully Ukraine has a future.”
The Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America will perform on Saturday, April 13 at 7 p.m. at the Gilder Center for the Arts at the Wheeler School in Providence. Ticket reservations and the contribution of the suggested minimum donation of $30 can be found on the ensemble’s website at banduristka.org/tickets.