Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych has more honors than a standard introduction can hold. Before the interview, though, he introduced himself far more modestly—”Grandpa Zhenia.” The aura of a “living classic,” impossible to set aside when it comes to Stankovych, softens in person under his endless self-irony and warm humor (we weren’t surprised—just noting it for the record).
Late last year, a project began to record the composer’s complete cycle of chamber symphonies, written over nearly 50 years. Toccata Classics recently released the first set of three chamber symphonies, and the full cycle is now also available for streaming.
We met with Yevhen Stankovych at the very start of the project, while the symphonies were still being recorded in the studio. Shortly after our conversation, his new work—a Requiem—had its premiere. This conversation is about the composer’s personal path and the state of music today. And also, a little, about his taste in food, space, and much more.
Just a few minutes ago you finished a composition class with a student. What motivates you to continue teaching?
Yevhen Stankovych: Life motivates me and communicating with people. At my age, I could shut myself away and not leave the house for six months. One’s worldview and perceptions change with age.
I studied at this academy under Borys Liatoshynskyi. I have been working here for over 40 years. Perhaps I come here out of inertia (laughs).
You have shared many memories of your studies with Liatoshynsky. I would like to pick up on one story: when you told him that the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is Andante. Lyatoshynsky replied that you should not come to his class until you had studied the symphony.
Yevhen Stankovych: Yes, that happened.
So, Liatoshynsky taught that there is a certain foundation in music history that a composer must know. How do you teach your students and what is that foundation for you now?
Yevhen Stankovych: Students write completely different music nowadays. If they had written such music in my time, three-quarters of the department would have gone mad. Today, a student brought me a piece for electronics: not a single natural sound, just noise. The world is changing.
I always tell my students that music is an infinite world. If a person wants to express this world to some extent, they need to know the basics. Just as a child begins to speak with the words “mama,” “give,” so a person who writes music must know Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Of course, it is very difficult to study this music in detail. Unfortunately, there is no time to analyze, for example, all of Bach’s fugues because they comprise a whole and unique world. However, the music of these composers is a seed that can sprout. At any time, it will bear fruit in its own way.
To feel comfortable when writing music, you need to know what came before you. We are all human beings. It would be one thing if we were constantly changing, transforming into some other form of life, but we remain human beings on this earth. There is a tradition, not just imitation of what was before us, but rather the continuity of our history, not only in music, but also in arts, literature, and life itself.
Surely, it is not easy to talk about this now, since the last three years have been very tense for everyone. Young people are probably even more tense than people my age. Today I congratulated Lesia Dychko on her birthday. She says she has no electricity or heating at home. To support her, I said, “I have the same situation, only worse.” Such are the times.
Still, I try to tell my students what Borys Liatoshynsky once taught me about the foundation in music history. Sure, he spoke in his own way, and I speak in mine. Yet the principles remain the same, at least for me.
The longer we live, the more the circle of fundamentals expands. What about 20th-century music?
Yevhen Stankovych: That’s right, the circle is expanding. The 20th century saw a shift in human consciousness and music. The geniuses Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel emerged. Schoenberg came along and caused turmoil in the world of music. All this was no accident. Obviously, there was a need for them to appear and for these changes to take place. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, but it’s inevitable.
It’s a complex question. If we believe quantum physics, there are several parallel worlds. Maybe what I’m talking about here, someone else is saying more intelligently somewhere else. Although, I consider myself to be intelligent. I’m just joking. Anyway, the new opportunities that appeared in the 20th century were urgent for their time.
They say that newer is better, but that’s nonsense. It’s just different. The avant-garde is one world, the continuation of tradition is another, and rock music is yet another. What once existed in relative unity is now undergoing stratification.
Music used to be considered a spiritual act of human activity. Nowadays, the spiritual factor is being questioned. Artificial intelligence may even call into question the existence of us all.
Nevertheless, art continues to live and evolve, and everything is remarkably diverse! Previously, there were individuals. Chopin differed from Schumann andSchumann differed from Mendelssohn, but they worked in the same tradition. Now, everyone is completely different.
Pavlo Tychyna wrote brilliantly: “Everything changes, renews itself, breaks apart.” Right now, everything is breaking apart. No one knows how long this will last.
Let’s talk about your personal discovery of new music: the early 1960s, the Lviv Conservatory, and classes with Andrzej Nikodemowicz. At that time, composers in the capital, who were later called the Kyiv avant-garde, were also discovering new music, somewhat underground. How did this happen in Lviv?
Yevhen Stankovych: In my case, I first encountered contemporary music, and only later became more familiar with classical music. I was admitted to the Lviv Conservatory as a student of Adam Soltys, who, incidentally, was a friend of Szymanowski. Andrzej Nikodemowicz taught me general piano. He was Polish and knew European contemporary music very well. He told me about the avant-garde and gave me a book by Ernst Krenek [Studies in Counterpoint: Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique — T.N.].
The book was mostly an analysis of Webern’s music. It was he who developed the serial technique. Schoenberg established dodecaphony, and Berg combined dodecaphony with more traditional harmony. I became interested in this music.
Did you also have Hanns Jelinek’s textbook on dodecaphony, which Hrabovsky himself translated from German in Kyiv in the early 1960s?
Yevgen Stankovych: Yes. Nikodemowicz had this book translated, and I read it before Leonid Hrabovsky.
In my first year, I was drafted into the army. I was already married at the time. My wife and her parents moved to Kyiv so after my service, I transferred to study there and ended up in Borys Liatoshynskyi’s class. If it weren’t for family circumstances, I would have stayed in Lviv with Andrzej Nikodemowicz.
However, thanks to Nikodemowicz, when I arrived in Kyiv, I already knew the serial technique perfectly well. It turned out that I knew Webern quite well, but didn’t know Bach very well, for example.
In my first year in Kyiv, I brought Liatoshynsky my compositions, so-called “left ones” [“livi”, nonmandatory – ed.]. He listened to them and asked, “Did you have measles as a child?” I said, “I don’t think so.” He said, “I didn’t either. So why should everyone have measles?” Liatoshynskyi warned against the thoughtless use of dissonance. He said, “You can use consonance.” You can!—he didn’t insist and spoke very delicately. He was a great musician.
Let’s go back to Lviv for a moment. How do you remember the musical environment there in the early 1960s, at the conservatory and in the city in general?
Yevhen Stankovych: When I was studying, Soltys was no longer writing much, but he knew contemporary music well. Liudkevych was already old, but he still had a very sharp mind. Liudkevych and I played together in a music folklore class; I played the melody, and he played the accompaniment. We played for half an hour while all the other students sat in class eating sunflower seeds.
If it weren’t for Liudkevych, I wouldn’t have been admitted to the conservatory. The admission committee didn’t like something in my compositions, but he stood up for me: “Don’t talk nonsense and let the kid study.” Those words decided everything.
Overall, in my opinion, the environment at the Lviv Conservatory was more progressive than at the Kyiv Conservatory. After all, it still felt like Europe in Lviv. There wasn’t the same level of control or ideological struggle as in Kyiv.
There were significantly fewer students in Lviv. For example, there were only two of us in my composition class. There were ten to twelve people in the course in Kyiv at that time. Liatoshynsky alone had Balakauskas, me, and Lykhovyd. Other faculty members in the same department had their own students.
It was freer in Lviv; there wasn’t such scrutiny of what composers wrote. At the same time, few people were familiar with Nikodemowicz’s music, for example. He wrote based on the New Viennese School, not always, but quite often. There was a period when his compositions just lay in his desk drawer because sending sheet music, for example, to Warsaw Autumn at that time was quite dangerous. To do so, you had to live in Moscow and, from Ukraine, “don’t even think about it!”
Speaking of Warsaw Autumn, another of your teachers, Borys Liatoshynsky, attended the festival at that time. How did he comment on the new music he heard there, and how did that influence your development?
Yevhen Stankovych: Liatoshynsky was personally invited to the Warsaw Autumn festival. He shared his impressions and told us who he listened to at the festival. He knew contemporary music very well—Schoenberg, Berg, Lutosławski, Penderecki, and Messiaen. It was his life.
Sometimes, Liatoshynsky would bring back recordings. We would listen and discuss them together. Lyatoshynsky did not accept many things, but he certainly did not deny this music’s right to exist. For him, the concept of a theme (subject) remained fundamentally important. It was deeper than just a traditional theme, but as a foundation, and as the main idea of a work. Just as there are words of the prophet in the Bible, so for Liatoshynskyi, there was a subject in music. That is why he did not accept, for example, sonorous music. With his knowledge, he could easily have written an avant-garde work, but many new ideas were unacceptable to him. He spoke about these works as a philosopher of music.
For us students, this new style of composing was already familiar. As a student, I had to write certain pieces as part of the curriculum, so I wrote dodecaphonic pieces. My graduation work, the First Cello Concerto, was also written in that idiom. I simply knew how to do it.
My colleagues Balakauskas and Lykhovyd wrote in the same style. Incidentally, Zahortsev and Karabyts studied with Lyatoshynsky sporadically, before I did. I studied with Borys Liatoshynsky for the last three and a half years before his death, starting in 1965.
At that time, it was already possible to write music in a contemporary manner. Those were not the days when authorities were going after Hrabowskyi, Silvestrov, and Hodzyatskyi, as they did in the early 1960s. Perhaps they continued to chase after them, but we, the younger ones, could already write in that idiom without any problems.
In general, my early music is closer to the avant-garde than what I write now. Although it wasn’t avant-garde, since avant-garde is what emerged in the post-war years. My model was the New Viennese School, from which the avant-garde later emerged. Strangely enough, many avant-garde artists later made a sharp idiom swing in their works.
At various stages of your musical path, there was what Olena Zinkevych, borrowing Stravinsky’s term, called tonicalnist, where even in atonal music, there is a sense of center, and of core. You moved away from dodecaphony and serial technique quite quickly. How did this transition happen for you?
Yevhen Stankovych: It happens differently for everyone. I know many such stories. For example, Solovkin—he was very talented and wrote avant-garde music. Then one day he said to me, “I can’t listen to Webern and Schoenberg.” Who’s forcing you? He felt that he had to listen to this music because it was contemporary. However, contemporary is how you feel right now. As Stravinsky brilliantly said, contemporary music is music written now, with time. What feels contemporary now, A minor or clusters?
Nowadays, stylistic tendencies are not a problem. The problem is what a person wants to express and what listeners perceive. For example, why is tonal music, such as Morricone’s, mostly written for movies? Because it is for the screens. Electronic music is not suitable for everything. Of course, it is suitable for Solaris, but for films of a different genre, tonal music is used. This means that there is a need for it.
Music reflects—God, I sound like a Marxist—what is happening in a person’s mind. No one has ever escaped this. You can say whatever you want, but in practice,you will only do what you are capable of. Every composer has his or her limitations. This is a philosophical question, and the answer to it has no beginning and no end. Each generation will respond in its own way. Even people from the same generation, for example, a colleague of my age, could answer that question completely differently than me and be right in his/her own way.
How do you perceive the works of composers who manifested the unemotionality of music and the absence of the human element in it?
Yevhen Stankovych: In which country?
I mean the post-war avant-garde in general, for example, Boulez with his structuring, and Stockhausen with his ideas about space, and so on.
Yevhen Stankovych: Space has many shades. Stockhausen didn’t fly into outer space. Nowadays, astronauts would have told him more about it.
At that time, it was the composer’s vision of the transformation of the universe. It did not appear artificially, and it simply couldn’t be different. Boulez also followed his own path. He studied the New Viennese School to show himself in a new light.
What attracts people the most? Something new. People are drawn to the new. However, it is unclear whether it is beneficial or not, whether it is worth pursuing, or whether it will be detrimental. Only time will tell. I am uncertain whether anyone will follow Boulez’s path now. Both his and Stockhausen’s works are rarely performed nowadays. Perhaps interest in them will return over time. Everything is very unpredictable now.
There is so much drama and extreme expression in your music.
Yevhen Stankovych: Well, it depends on what I eat. Just kidding. That’s just how I feel about the world, and that’s my nature. Before I start working on a piece, I imagine what I would like to do. Then it turns out that I do what I can.
I have written a lot of commissioned works for conductors and performers, but they never told me what I should write. I always wrote what I felt myself.
You have already mentioned changes in your musical language, from radical to more moderate. However, that personal factor in music was obviously important to you at every stage, including during your so-called “avant-garde” period. For example, there is a mass of sound, at times almost sonorous writing, in the First Symphony of 1973, Sinfonia Larga, and yet, in this complex texture, there is always a voice, something human, and intensely emotional.
Yevhen Stankovych: You see, everyone goes their own way. I followed my own path. I tried not to copy anyone. In music, I cannot separate myself from myself.
Life circumstances dictated that I write a lot of music for movies, since I had to earn money. Who needed my symphonies? I had to write music for movies clearly and concisely, about love and revolution. However, in symphonies, I could do whatever I wanted.
I was lucky because I had contact with outstanding musicians, Blazhkov, Turchak, Hlushchenko, and Matyukhin. I helped Matyukhin create a chamber orchestra. Also, many foreign performers were very supportive of me.
These musicians were interested in non-traditional music, and they inspired my colleagues and me to compose. I wrote Sinfonia Larga knowing that Blazhkov would perform it. I wrote the third chamber work knowing that Sharoev would conduct it. I am very grateful to all the musicians I worked with—if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be here today.
At that time, there was a strong need for people who would develop new music, not only in Kyiv but throughout the former Soviet Union. In Latvia, for example, my friend Pēteris Plakidis was involved in this, as was Pēteris Vasks. They are wonderful people and great professionals. I won’t even mention the “rotten West” [referring to a Soviet propaganda idiom– ed.]—it all came to us from there. It was bound to happen, and it emerged.
Read also: Latvian composer Peteris Vasks: “Our most popular piece is the National Anthem of Ukraine”
A frequent technique in your music is the juxtaposition of rhythm and melody as two poles, as if to contrast something mechanical and external, versus something intimate and internal. This is particularly evident in the Third Chamber Symphony. Is this principle a conscious choice each time, or is it a natural mode of thinking?
Yevhen Stankovych: It’s always intuitive.
In music, intuition plays a very important role alongside knowledge. Even Messiaen composed his bird’s music intuitively.
Surely, the result can vary. Beethoven was not rational, but all his sonatas seem almost mathematically calculated. This ability is simply part of human nature. It needs to be nurtured and developed.
A large-scale project is currently underway to record an anthology of your chamber symphonies. An album with studio recordings of 15 chamber symphonies and two large ones—No. 1 Larga and No. 4 Lirica—will be released soon. All these works were written at different times, in different contexts. Can we talk about parallels between these works that will be apparent in a common context?
Yevhen Stankovych: This project was a surprise for me. I found out about it when everything had been decided, and the recordings were being made. These works were written over a period of more than 40 years. The first chamber piece was commissioned by the world-famous violinist Oleh Krysa, the second by Fedir Hluschenko, and the third by flutist Oleh Kudryashov. The fifth was commissioned by French clarinetist Philippe Cuper. The sixth was commissioned by Vasyl Pylypchak, the seventh by Bohodar Kotorovych, and so on. At different times, there were different goals. However, I will repeat myself againthat I set these goals for myself; no one dictated them to me.
The fate of these works varied. The third chamber piece was performed by flutists from different countries around the world, which is why it gained the most popularity. The first, for example, was performed less often.
I am very grateful to Natalia Ponomarchuk for compiling these symphonies. I know some of the musicians from the orchestra, and they are wonderful. The musicians are recording this album in difficult conditions, such as air raid sirens, no electricity, etc. I am very grateful to them.
Unfortunately, I don’t attend recordings due to my health. I injured my back before my trip to America. I slipped and fell while going to the marketplace. Before that, I had been going to the wine shop and never fell once! Why didn’t I visit the wine shop again?
Soon there will be the premiere of Requiem, my latest work (the premiere took place on November 2nd, 2025, at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine — T.N.). Volodymyr Sirenko and Yevhen Savchuk, two great figures in Ukrainian music, are working on it.
Is Requiem dedicated to the theme of war?
Yevhen Stankovych: I previously wrote Psalms of War. The content there is more specific because it is close to certain events. In Requiem, it is more general.
Today, everyone understands what a requiem is. To whom should it be dedicated? To those who have passed away. Here, you walk around and see so many requiems! All of them are young people, my grandchildren’s generation (referring to the memorial to the fallen defenders of Ukraine in the full-scale war—the Alley of Glory on Independence Square in front of the National Music Academy of Ukraine — T.N.).
I have addressed similar themes before, in Panachyda for Holodomor Victims and Kaddish Requiem Babyn Yar. For example, when writing Babyn Yar, I researched Kaddish and studied religious texts. The musical work itself is secular, featuring poems by Dmytro Pavlychko. The same is true of requiems: Brahms’s German Requiem and Britten’s War Requiem are secular works, while those by Mozart and Verdi are canonical.
My requiem is written on canonical texts in Latin. These are common texts, but everyone sees their own meaning in them. They are symbols, like, for example,the Day of Wrath.
Isn’t every day of life in Ukraine a day of wrath for us now?
In this context, I would like to ask whether your perception of Russian culture has changed over the years of war?
Yevhen Stankovych: I believe that Ukraine’s current cancellation of Russian culture is logical. It is a natural response to the horrors that have taken place. How many people have been killed by the Russians! We are in a terrible war, and we are fighting. It is perfectly normal to reject Russian culture right now.
Let’s return to the context of Ukrainian music. I’ll start from afar. In one interview, Giya Kancheli was asked how he perceives the music of composers of the younger generation. He was about 60 years old at the time. Kancheli replied that…
Yevhen Stankovych: Probably, that he himself is still young.
Yes! That’s probably why he doesn’t judge this generation, because he feels like he’s part of it. How do you feel about generational changes in Ukrainian music?
Yevhen Stankovych: I have a very positive attitude toward change. Let people follow their own paths. For my part, I can only do what I can. Everyone has the right to explore and progress. I wish them success.
Was there a moment when you heard a composer and realized, “This is the new generation”?
Yevhen Stankovych: They are all new. There are works that cause a lot of noise but then fade away over time. Sometimes the opposite happens and works are revived when everyone has almost forgotten about them. Nothing can be predicted. We have a lot of talented young people. Their fate certainly does not depend on what I think of them.
Finally, do you listen to music for pleasure?
Yevhen Stankovych: I don’t have time to listen for pleasure since I’m either hiding from shelling or working. I used to listen to music regularly. Now less so, but I still try. If I have the opportunity, I listen. Music is my life.
A century from now, our time will not be judged by the verbiage that is heard today as it will disappear. However, music—good music—will remain. The fact that music continues to be played in Ukraine today is a miracle. It is our autobiography, and our chronicle. It is important both for the future and for us today.
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