Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 11
“The collaborative, community-engaged, practice-based study out of which this chapter has arisen inspires an understanding of a diaspora community as a community of practice
New knowledge is created through the process of creative, critical inquiry (e.g., singing and other aspects of music-making), not merely in the outcomes of research (e.g., digital media, publications).”
Studying Byzantine Ukrainian congregational music in Canada: considering community and diaspora
By Marcia Ostashewski
Abstract
Scholarship on Ukrainian culture and experience in Canada typically refers to processes of “assimilation,” implicit in which are notions of “absorption” or the “taking in” of one culture by another. So common is this paradigm that, today, even a standard dictionary definition of assimilation refers specifically to a process that integrates immigrants. In the face of pressure to assimilate, historians have argued that Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches have long been “central in preserving the language, culture and identity of Ukrainian Canadians.” Much recent scholarship also uses the concept of “negotiation”—of “identity”—to refer to the experiences of immigrant cultures. Scholars of Ukrainian diaspora in Canada indicate that religious musical practice, in particular, served as a resource for early immigrants to the country at the turn of the 1900s; it helped many negotiate their identities and actions as individuals and communities during immigration, settlement, and subsequent community activities. But Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical congregational responsorial singing, a cantor-led practice, is tied to long and complicated human histories that have always been shaped by religious rites, movements of people, politics enacted on grand and local scales, cultural changes in modern times, as well as the resources, aesthetics, and capacities available to practitioners. Investigations into the contemporary practice of this Ukrainian musico-religious practice in Canada reveal aspects of a nuanced and complex cultural politics at play. Where the practice is purported to “preserve” language, we see a change in language use over time, from Slavonic, to vernacular Ukrainian (and multiple versions to reflect changes over time), to the integration of the English vernacular; where the cantor-led practice is traditionally male, continuity in the practice has necessitated the integration of women to lead; and where the content was once simply transplanted from Eastern European locations to new ones in North America, the practice now integrates content drawn from local practices, allying Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical practice with local peoples, cultures, and traditions. Where ethnic studies and ethnomusicology have tended to invoke music as a symbol of cultural identity, pride, and unity, the examples Ostashewski describes illuminate greater complexity in the histories and practice of Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical congregational responsorial music in Canada, bolstering arguments that diaspora studies in the context of contemporary ethnomusicology thus challenges to rethink some of our paradigms of immigration, culture, and diaspora.