UKRAINIAN WAR REQUIEM: composer's introduction
The world premiere recording of Ukrainian War Requiem will be released in February of 2025 on the Cappella Records label. This is my introduction that I wrote for the album liner notes.
—Benedict
When the news broke in February of 2022 that Russia had launched an unprovoked full-scale ground assault on the sovereign nation of Ukraine, I was horrified. In the days and weeks that followed, my horror deepened to disgust as I watched the Patriarch of Moscow proclaim the Russian Church’s full support of Putin’s war, and on supposed “spiritual” grounds, invoking an existential battle between the morally corrupt liberal West and the pious and God-fearing Russian state. And finally, to my utter dismay, I found that many Orthodox believers in America were happy to parrot this line as well—even some within my own immediate circle of acquaintance. It was incomprehensible to me that any sensible person, let alone those who purport to follow a loving God whose kingdom is “not of this world,” could see this attack as anything other than an act of naked brutality, perpetrated by a tyrant using the language of spiritual warfare for his own selfish ends. I wished I could do something. I wished that I could voice my opposition and express solidarity with the suffering Ukrainian people in some meaningful and constructive way. And so, when later that same year Damein Zakordonski and Steven Brese of Axios Men’s Ensemble in Edmonton reached out to me with a proposal to commission a new composition in honor of those fallen in Ukraine’s struggle for freedom, my heart leaped at the prospect.
Before I say more about the piece that I would eventually write, however, let me first address what seem to me to be some obvious questions. First, why me? Why should I be the one to compose this piece? I’m not Ukrainian or from any kind of Slavic background whatsoever. I’m a generically white American of mixed Western European descent with an Irish last name, whose parents converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in his childhood. Shouldn’t this piece be written by Ukrainian composer? And second, though I admittedly care deeply about the plight of Ukraine, there is no shortage of tragedies happening in the world right now—genocide in Gaza, climate change, mass shootings, a rising tide of racially and sexually motivated violence, to name just a few—so why should I devote my limited creative energies to this particular conflict? On the face of it, or so I thought, I’m probably not the right composer to write a piece honouring the Ukrainian experience and the suffering that they continue to endure at the hands of their oppressors, as important as such a project might be. The answer that Damein and Steven gave me when I asked these questions was simply that they admired my liturgical compositions a great deal, especially my Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and the ways in which I was bringing Eastern Rite sacred music into a new context and soundworld without detaching it from its roots. And so they insisted that I was indeed the right person for the job. As we all spoke further, and as I contemplated more deeply both the piece itself and the interesting and unique character of Axios—a Canadian men’s choir made up mostly of singers from Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds, but also from a variety of other backgrounds and beliefs as well—I began to see what I might have to offer.
About one thing, at least, I agree with the Patriarch of Moscow: I believe that the Ukrainian struggle for independence is not simply a matter of local or regional concern. On the contrary, I feel that in many ways Ukraine is on the front lines of a much larger conflict taking place around the world right now between those who believe that humans have a basic right to define who and what they are—both individually and collectively—and those who do not. For this reason, therefore, I actually think it makes good sense to have someone from a non-Ukrainian background, but one who at the same time identifies deeply with the underlying values that Ukraine represents, write a piece honouring Ukraine’s struggle on behalf of the free world.
As I set about crafting a vision for my composition, I happened upon an article by George Packer in the October 2022 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. In the article, titled “Ukrainians Are Defending the Values Americans Claim to Hold,” Packer describes the Ukrainian concept of hromada. Though the word has a complex history and a number of meanings, it roughly translates to self-organization. As a concept, hromada is deeply ingrained in the Ukrainian psyche, connoting the belief that “politics is about horizontal relationships between people and not about vertical relations of power,” according to Ukrainian philosopher and journalist Volodymyr Yermolenko (quoted in the article). Essentially, hromada says: we decide who we are. In community and dialogue, yes. And informed by experience and tradition, yes. But our identities, goals and values cannot be dictated to us from on high. And certainly not at gunpoint. Obviously, this idea resonates deeply with anyone who believes in liberal democratic principles and individual human rights. It also clearly runs counter to every authoritarian and theocratic ideology, Putin’s Russia being but one example. I found myself inspired, and I knew that I had come upon the core message of my piece.
At a basic level, the Ukrainian War Requiem is a Ukrainian Catholic/Orthodox Memorial Service, or Panakhyda. But the very fact that I use the hybrid term “Catholic/Orthodox” to describe it should indicate that there’s something at least a little unusual going on. From the very earliest centuries of Christianity in Ukraine—or Rus', as the region was then known—religious and ethnic diversity was simply a fact of life. Kyiv was an old and respected city, even at the beginning of the Second Millenium CE, and was additionally an important nexus of international trade, sitting as it does at the gateway between Europe and the Asian continent. As such, for centuries Kyiv was home to people from a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs. After the Church Union of Berestia—an agreement between a number of Ukrainian Orthodox eparchies and the Church of Rome that took place at the end of the 16th century—Ukrainian believers became nearly evenly split between the two main branches of ancient Christianity, and so the need for religious tolerance became even more central to the Ukrainian identity. While the road to such tolerance has by no means always been smooth for Ukrainians, a deep valuing of peaceful coexistence continues to be a dominant force in Ukrainian culture up to the present day. Muscovy, by contrast, which rose to prominence only in the 15th century as part of Tsar Ivan III’s efforts to consolidate power, has always had a fraught relationship with notions of tolerance. Centralization and hierarchy have long been cornerstones of the Russian cultural edifice, and they remain so to this day.
So, returning to the Requiem itself, even in the basic liturgical structure upon which my piece is based, one can see evidence of the Ukrainian people’s hard-won acceptance of religious and cultural diversity. Add to this the fact that the ensemble commissioning the work was not simply Ukrainian but also Canadian, and not simply Catholic or Orthodox but both—as well as many other things besides. I consequently knew that my piece had to honor the mingled Ukrainian and Canadian spirit of openness, especially since it was precisely this spirit that put Ukraine in the crosshairs of Putin’s autocratic regime. To that end, therefore, my piece uses a mixture of languages—Ukrainian, English, and Latin—and combines a variety of musical influences, including Ukrainian and Galician plainchant (samoilka), Gregorian chant, a Ukrainian Jewish psalm tone (nusach), and an array of original melodies. Then, as a symbol of all these things congregating under the “big tent” of Ukrainian identity and tradition, I chose to use a fragment of the Ukrainian national anthem, “Ukraine Shall Live On” by Mykhailo Verbytsky, as a unifying leitmotif that stitches the various movements together. Languages and melodies interact with one another throughout the work, influencing one another and changing in subtle ways. Meanwhile, the anthem fragment appears and reappears in various guises, undergoing a sort of “hero’s journey” over the course of the piece’s twelve movements. In the penultimate movement, “Eternal Memory & Light,” for which I created my own hybrid text combining Ukrainian and English texts from the Panakhyda with a similar text from the Latin Requiem Mass, I intentionally chose to leave out the national anthem as a way of honoring the tragic loss of Ukrainian life and liberty. Finally, in the last movement, “In Paradisum,” the national anthem makes a triumphant return on the words “in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem” (into the holy city of Jerusalem), thus offering up the hope that even in the face of unspeakable brutality, the Ukrainian spirit of liberty and tolerance—though it may be scarred and shaken—will rise up once again victorious.
Such is my fervent hope for Ukraine. And such is my hope for the world. On my darkest days, even as I sit comfortably in my studio in Pennsylvania, far from the horrors and bloodshed of the Ukrainian battlefields, my heart trembles at the thought of what might happen to all of us should Putin and his various lookalikes prove stronger than Ukraine and the rest of the free world can withstand. Even here in the United States, the values of tolerance, open-mindedness, and respect for individual autonomy are under very real threat from newly rehabilitated authoritarian ideologies and unscrupulous demagogues. If this can happen even here in my homeland, once the beacon of liberty and democracy (in word, if not always in deed), I begin to wonder whether it might not soon happen everywhere. But this is only on my darkest days. Today, as the sun filters in, and as a white-throated sparrow sings its plaintive little three-note song just outside my window, I remember that there is still good cause for hope. I remember that there are still free people in the world, singing songs of freedom with free and open hearts. And I remember the lessons of history—and that even though tyrants may rise up and wreak havoc on the world for a time, the insatiable human thirst for freedom always seems to win out in the end. And I remember Ukraine and her heroic battle for freedom, and that, at least today, she is still standing proud against seemingly impossible odds. As I sit in my sunlit office, enjoying a measure of freedom that precious few humans in history could have ever imagined, I remember that there are still countless brave souls all over the world willing to sacrifice their lives so that I and my children might continue to enjoy that freedom. So today, in the sunlight, I remember. And today, I hope.
— Benedict Sheehan
Trexlertown, Pennsylvania | November 14, 2024