On September 2, after more than ten years of research, writing, revising, postponing, composing, teaching, moving between countries, surviving a pandemic, and becoming a mother somewhere in the middle of it all, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation.
The dissertation is called Reimagining Folk Songs: Tradition and Innovation in Georgy Sviridov’s Kursk Songs. It explores Sviridov’s remarkable 1964 cantata, a work based on traditional songs collected in the Kursk region of Russia.
That is the official description.
The unofficial description is that I spent more than a decade thinking intensely about seven very short folk songs.
This sounds slightly unreasonable until one begins looking closely at them.
The story behind Kursk Songs begins in the summer of 1954, when the Russian ethnomusicologist Anna Rudneva led a Moscow Conservatory expedition to several villages in the Kursk region. The expedition documented more than 170 songs and instrumental tunes. Fifty were eventually selected for publication in Rudneva’s 1957 collection, and Sviridov chose seven of them for his cantata.
Obtaining those original published materials for my research turned into a small odyssey of its own. They were not exactly waiting patiently on the “New and Popular” shelf of my neighborhood library. Finding them required time, persistence, help from several generous people, and the sort of increasingly improbable chain of events familiar to anyone who has ever searched for a rare Soviet-era publication.
At various points, the materials seemed to occupy that special scholarly category somewhere between “extremely difficult to locate” and “perhaps this object exists only in a footnote.”
Eventually, however, they found their way to me.
This made it possible to place Rudneva’s transcriptions beside Sviridov’s score and ask a deceptively simple question: what did he actually do with these songs?
The answer turned out to be: quite a lot.
Sviridov preserves enough of each source for its identity to remain unmistakable, but he also transforms nearly every dimension around it—form, harmony, rhythm, choral texture, orchestration, and dramatic function. The original melodies remain present, yet they begin to inhabit a completely different expressive world.
What fascinated me most was that Kursk Songs is neither a decorative arrangement of folk melodies nor an attempt to reconstruct an untouched musical past. Sviridov creates something modern and unmistakably his own, while allowing the character, irregularity, and expressive force of the original songs to remain alive.
The seven movements gradually form what he described as a kind of poem about the life, dreams, and destiny of a woman. Individual songs—compact, local, and rooted in specific performance traditions—become part of a larger dramatic arc. The musical means are often surprisingly economical, but the emotional world they produce is enormous.
Of course, discovering all of this was considerably faster than completing a dissertation about it.
The dissertation accompanied me through so many different chapters of my life that it eventually began to feel less like a document and more like a slightly demanding relative. It was always there. Occasionally quiet, occasionally reproachful, and apparently planning to stay indefinitely.
Meanwhile, I wrote other music. I taught. I conducted. I moved. I performed. I met deadlines that had the advantage of being attached to actual concert dates. I had a baby. The dissertation remained remarkably unmoved by all of this.
But this year, something shifted. With the help, patience, and encouragement of my advisor, readers, and committee, the work finally reached the point at which it was ready to be defended.
The defense itself took place over Zoom, which means that the conclusion of this decade-long intellectual journey is commemorated by a screenshot of several very kind and intelligent people arranged in small rectangles.
Honestly, I find this perfect.
I was deeply grateful for the generosity of the conversation and for the care with which my committee engaged with the project. After so many years spent alone with these materials, it was wonderful—and slightly surreal—to discuss them together and realize that the dissertation had become a completed piece of scholarship rather than a permanent item on my to-do list.
I successfully defended it.
I then learned, as generations of doctoral candidates have learned before me, that “successfully defended” is a beautiful phrase meaning “please make a few more revisions.”
And so, I am currently finishing those revisions. But the defense marked the real end of an extraordinarily long chapter—and, I hope, the beginning of a new one.
Perhaps that is also why I am finally beginning this blog.
Much of a musician’s life happens between the polished announcements: between the premiere and the recording, between the first sketch and the final score, between the discovery of an elusive source and the dissertation that emerges many years later. Those unfinished, unpredictable, and frequently ridiculous stretches are often where the most interesting things happen.
So this will be a place for some of those stories: music in progress, performances in preparation, discoveries, occasional disasters, and whatever else happens between one deadline and the next.
The dissertation may be nearly finished.
Everything else, fortunately, is still in progress.
The dissertation is called Reimagining Folk Songs: Tradition and Innovation in Georgy Sviridov’s Kursk Songs. It explores Sviridov’s remarkable 1964 cantata, a work based on traditional songs collected in the Kursk region of Russia.
That is the official description.
The unofficial description is that I spent more than a decade thinking intensely about seven very short folk songs.
This sounds slightly unreasonable until one begins looking closely at them.
The story behind Kursk Songs begins in the summer of 1954, when the Russian ethnomusicologist Anna Rudneva led a Moscow Conservatory expedition to several villages in the Kursk region. The expedition documented more than 170 songs and instrumental tunes. Fifty were eventually selected for publication in Rudneva’s 1957 collection, and Sviridov chose seven of them for his cantata.
Obtaining those original published materials for my research turned into a small odyssey of its own. They were not exactly waiting patiently on the “New and Popular” shelf of my neighborhood library. Finding them required time, persistence, help from several generous people, and the sort of increasingly improbable chain of events familiar to anyone who has ever searched for a rare Soviet-era publication.
At various points, the materials seemed to occupy that special scholarly category somewhere between “extremely difficult to locate” and “perhaps this object exists only in a footnote.”
Eventually, however, they found their way to me.
This made it possible to place Rudneva’s transcriptions beside Sviridov’s score and ask a deceptively simple question: what did he actually do with these songs?
The answer turned out to be: quite a lot.
Sviridov preserves enough of each source for its identity to remain unmistakable, but he also transforms nearly every dimension around it—form, harmony, rhythm, choral texture, orchestration, and dramatic function. The original melodies remain present, yet they begin to inhabit a completely different expressive world.
What fascinated me most was that Kursk Songs is neither a decorative arrangement of folk melodies nor an attempt to reconstruct an untouched musical past. Sviridov creates something modern and unmistakably his own, while allowing the character, irregularity, and expressive force of the original songs to remain alive.
The seven movements gradually form what he described as a kind of poem about the life, dreams, and destiny of a woman. Individual songs—compact, local, and rooted in specific performance traditions—become part of a larger dramatic arc. The musical means are often surprisingly economical, but the emotional world they produce is enormous.
Of course, discovering all of this was considerably faster than completing a dissertation about it.
The dissertation accompanied me through so many different chapters of my life that it eventually began to feel less like a document and more like a slightly demanding relative. It was always there. Occasionally quiet, occasionally reproachful, and apparently planning to stay indefinitely.
Meanwhile, I wrote other music. I taught. I conducted. I moved. I performed. I met deadlines that had the advantage of being attached to actual concert dates. I had a baby. The dissertation remained remarkably unmoved by all of this.
But this year, something shifted. With the help, patience, and encouragement of my advisor, readers, and committee, the work finally reached the point at which it was ready to be defended.
The defense itself took place over Zoom, which means that the conclusion of this decade-long intellectual journey is commemorated by a screenshot of several very kind and intelligent people arranged in small rectangles.
Honestly, I find this perfect.
I was deeply grateful for the generosity of the conversation and for the care with which my committee engaged with the project. After so many years spent alone with these materials, it was wonderful—and slightly surreal—to discuss them together and realize that the dissertation had become a completed piece of scholarship rather than a permanent item on my to-do list.
I successfully defended it.
I then learned, as generations of doctoral candidates have learned before me, that “successfully defended” is a beautiful phrase meaning “please make a few more revisions.”
And so, I am currently finishing those revisions. But the defense marked the real end of an extraordinarily long chapter—and, I hope, the beginning of a new one.
Perhaps that is also why I am finally beginning this blog.
Much of a musician’s life happens between the polished announcements: between the premiere and the recording, between the first sketch and the final score, between the discovery of an elusive source and the dissertation that emerges many years later. Those unfinished, unpredictable, and frequently ridiculous stretches are often where the most interesting things happen.
So this will be a place for some of those stories: music in progress, performances in preparation, discoveries, occasional disasters, and whatever else happens between one deadline and the next.
The dissertation may be nearly finished.
Everything else, fortunately, is still in progress.