The Mystery of the Ukrainian Voices
Composer Heinali and singer Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko explore the music of medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen
In the liner notes to his new album, Ukrainian composer Heinali vividly describes the moment when a Russian artillery missile struck near his former studio in Kyiv.
The album in question, Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), is a collaboration with fellow Ukrainian folk singer Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko and features modern interpretations of two long-form compositions by German medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
Recorded in the Cistercian abbey of Sylvanès in Southern France, Гільдеґарда (Hildegard) is a combination of Saienko’s intense, fiery vocals and Heinali’s polyphonic improvisations and modular synthesizer drones. The result is not merely an academic exercise – it’s a highly captivating and truly experimental body of work, channeling emotions like anger, grief and despair, but also evoking ideas of resistance, freedom and hope.
“This album is not a historically informed performance”, Heinali writes. “Hildegard’s persona and music are a starting point – a distant mirror [that] allows us to reflect, comprehend, externalise, and transcend traumatic wartime experience, reinstating the embodied origins of Christianity, which contained suffering but also offered the promise of transcendence.”
“Hildegard’s music can place great demands on the bodies of its performers, emphasizing uncomfortable intervals and the wide distance between the lowest and highest pitch”, he continues. “Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko emphasises this physical aspect of Hildegard’s music by drawing on authentic Ukrainian folk singing, a form that survived despite efforts by the Soviet occupation to replace it with a simulacrum that is naive, harmless, and devoid of contradictions – an attempt to ‘civilise’ the body by disembodying it.”
I spoke to the two artists over Zoom on 12 May 2025.
Why do two Ukrainian artists decide to make a record based on the music of a German medieval mystic and healer?
Heinali: I had this idea for quite a long time, maybe seven or eight years, but I couldn't find a reasonable approach. I didn’t want to make a traditional early music record, and it wasn’t interesting to do some sort of synthesized interpretations of Hildegard’s music either – that had all been done before. It was just after I met Yasia [Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko] that I realized that finding a connection to her music through authentic Ukrainian singing could be interesting.
Before the [Russian] full scale invasion [of Ukraine]. I probably wouldn't have made this record at all. I was a bit afraid of working with folk music. It's very popular now; since the mid-2010s, it’s been a trendy thing to do, and a lot of Ukrainian artists work with folklore in a way that to me personally is not interesting at all, so I wanted to stay away from it for as long as possible. But now this approach makes sense to me – not just intellectually, but emotionally as well.
Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: In Ukraine, we have a lot of ethnomusicologists, like proper scientists of traditional Ukrainian folklore. That’s not my background – I came to these traditional songs through theatre workshops, and I encountered them when I was already an adult. My main goal is not to sing them in a traditional way, but rather try to find my own natural voice, with that Ukrainian base that I have inside of me. But on Hildegard, I sing the original lyrics, and I don’t do much improvisation.
Oleh, you’ve been working with early music for years, recreating its polyphony on modular synthesizers. What is it that fascinates you about these ancient compositional techniques?
Heinali: Polyphony can create a certain state of mind that I find missing in contemporary music. When you try to follow all these voices that exist together in the same space at the same time, which is actually paradoxical, it’s an impossible task – even for a music composer with a well-trained ear –, so you get into this dissociative state. It's not similar to the trance-like state that drone or ambient music evoke, which calls you back into the womb – it tries to lull you to sleep, to comfort you. Polyphonic music keeps you awake and aware of the state you are in. To me, it's about experiencing and exploring these states.
The music feels alien, almost like an artifact from another planet, because it's so far away in time, and culturally as well. At the same time, it’s incredibly relevant to us today. For example, I was carrying this wartime experience with me passively for a long time, but through witnessing polyphonic music I could for the first time actively engage with it, because it was externalized, you know? That was a very powerful moment, initiated by music that was written 600 years ago, in a completely different context. Still, it managed to do something to me that no contemporary music was able to do. This is one of the reasons why the Hildegard project exists.
Hildegard von Bingen’s vocal music is extremely difficult to sing – it features a wide pitch-range, which is not easy to perform. How did you prepare, Yasia?
Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: I worked a lot. (laughs) For Ukrainian traditional singing, you need to engage the whole body. It's a process, and I worked on it for the last six or seven years, so I'm well-trained now. It wasn’t so difficult for me. What was difficult was to not follow my academic ego, which tells you to always sing in the musically correct way. But when you try to control everything, the music loses meaning. The challenge is to be attentive and aware of what I’m doing – I’m singing in Latin, so I need to remember and pronounce all the words right –, but at the same time to stay free and open. Hildegard teaches me to be radically honest on stage.
It's still an ongoing process, and I don't think the job is done yet. Every time I come to stage and sing, it feels a bit different. It's unpredictable. Honestly, I'm not singing for the audience. I’m so sorry. (laughs) For me, it's actually a form of prayer. I don’t really care about the audience, because I am having a conversation with God, and I just let the audience witness it. But I know that my main listener is listening.
This is getting a bit theoretical now, but there are some actual similarities between Ukrainian folk music and German medieval music, right?
Heinali: Well, they’re both rooted in one mode. And when you stay in one mode, so you’re not modulating, the music tends to create a certain state of mind; it kind of collects the atmosphere.
When you tell people about polyphony, they usually think about polyphonic music written by Western composers for church – the sacred music. But there were a lot of other polyphonic practices as well, in Sardinia for example. Because they were folk, they were considered less valuable, but they’re every bit as complex, as challenging, as contradictory, as fantastic, as the church polyphony. Authentic Ukrainian folk music is unique in its own way, but it's not that different from other folkloric practices like those in Sardinia. Ukraine was always culturally connected to Europe.
Tell me about the experience of recording at Sylvanès abbey in Southern France. Why did you choose that specific location?
Heinali: We’d recorded the demos in a studio in Wrocław, Poland, just to find out whether the idea actually works. After those recordings, we were offered this residency at Sylvanès, and it turned out to be the perfect place to record Hildegard, because of the Cistercian acoustics. The church was built with porous, textured stone, so it doesn't reflect the sound directly. Instead, it dissipates and absorbs the sound, so you get a long reverberation tail, around eight or nine seconds, like in a gothic cathedral. But this reverberation is not as muddy as in a gothic cathedral, it's almost crystal clear. It was perfect for what we were trying to do.
My personal approach to music has quite a lot of similarities to how Cistercians thought about architecture. They were minimalists; they tried to achieve the most effective results with the minimum tools or materials. Their approach to architecture is very clear and direct, well-defined and well-articulated in visual language, without any additional unnecessary ornamentations, and it's also full of intellectual and religious meaning.
Another interesting coincidence was that we recorded it on 17 September 2024, which actually wasn't our choice. It's the date of Hildegard’s death, and the biggest Hildegard festival is held on this date at her former abbey in Bingen, Germany. But I realized that only afterwards.
“Today, for us as a nation, this kind of singing is not just about tradition. It’s about staying alive.”
(Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko)
In the digital edition, there is a bonus track called Zelenaia Dubrovonka (The Green Oak Grove), which is a folk song from the Polissia region. You mentioned the folklore renaissance after the Russian invasion. What do these songs mean to Ukrainians at this particular time in history?
Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: This song in particular is the lament of a woman. She asks the forest: “Why are you making so much noise?” And in the original version, the forest responds: “There is a Tatar moving through me and beating me.” But I changed the word ‘tatar’ to ‘moskowid’, because the lyrics to the song have always been adapted to reflect contemporary history.
It’s really interesting that traditional Ukrainian singing was abandoned in Soviet time. When you listen to these songs, you hear this truly open and free voice, this fabulous polyphony and these fantastic melodies that you just cannot catch. I remember when I was first learning the songs, I was laying down on the floor and listening again and again, trying to understand how these old women sing these elusive little melodies.
To me, these songs represent the independent nature of Ukrainians, the dignity of our free spirit. Russians don’t understand these qualities, because they don’t have that mindset. They were always ruled by tsars. They don’t know how it feels to stand on your land and feel this connection to the earth and God, sky and universe, and to feel that you have the right to sing in that open, free way. Today, for us as a nation, this kind of singing is not just about tradition. It’s about staying alive.
Heinali: The general folklore trend, which I mentioned earlier, is not that deep though. They just use parts of the old melodies, which were transformed by the Soviet regime. It’s typical colonial practice. You would remove all these microtonal inflections, these difficult rhythms and the non-standard vocal production techniques. You would flatten the rhythm and the melody, so it would correspond to the equal tempered scale of Western European music, the Western classical music canon. You essentially take something that is alive and turn it into a museum piece – safe, friendly and naive, so it can’t do any harm. Of course this has nothing to do with real, authentic culture, but it can be easily controlled.
Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: The authentic Ukrainian singing is quite niche indeed, but I am lucky to be part of this singing community in my hometown of Lviv. We have a few of these bohemian cafés and bars in the city centre, where we will just meet on a Friday night, and we will start to sing in the café, or out in the streets. We try to keep the true energy of these songs alive. We feel that it's an ongoing tradition, it's still alive through us in that very moment. In Lviv, the feeling of being alive is so sharp right now. It’s like every moment could be your last one, so you really try to enjoy it.
The album Гільдеґарда (Hildegard) by Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko will be released on 30 May 2025. It can be pre-ordered now.