“Music will determine how this war will be remembered.” Role of songs in memorial culture and living with loss

“Cheka showed us all that culture and song are not just culture and song. It is the DNA of the nation,” Nastia Skavronska wrote about the farewell ceremony for paramedic Iryna Tsybukh, who died on May 29 during a rotation in the Kharkiv region.

In her will, she asked that people sing at her funeral, so she compiled a list of 10 songs for this purpose. And thousands of people sang on the Maidan in Kyiv. People also sang to say goodbye to Iryna in Lviv on the day of her funeral.

Music plays an important role in memorial traditions, according to both researchers of folk customs and psychologists. It is an element of honoring and preserving memory, and can also have a therapeutic effect.

Folklorist Nataliia Khomenko recalls an incident from her practice. Once she was driving elderly displaced women to a village near Chornobyl. The road was covered with bushes and weeds, so they had to walk part of the way.

“As soon as we entered the village, we first saw the house of one of the women who was with us. And she immediately started singing about what was happening: that she didn't live there, that everything was covered with weeds,” Nataliia says.

Ukrainians have long sung about various events, including epidemics, droughts, and lamentations for their homeland. Thanks to these songs, we can now learn about how people used to live.

The music does not avoid the topics of war, death, and terrorist attacks, and helps to understand the tragedies of our own and other peoples.

After the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001, the American artist Toby Keith wrote Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). It was a response to the death of his father in the attack. At first, Toby performed it live only for military personnel. But Marine General James L. Jones convinced him to record the song, saying it was his “duty as an American citizen”.

After the terrorist attack, musician Bruce Springsteen released several songs in his album The Rising, which tell about the tragedy from the perspective of, for example, a widow who lost her husband, a firefighter's wife, etc.

On July 27, 2002, a plane crash occurred in Sknyliv, the Lviv region.

Rapper Palindrome wrote a song about it. The performer was also supposed to be at the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the 14th Aviation Corps of the Ukrainian Air Force at Sknyliv airfield. But he stayed home. Then the plane was too low, hit a tree, and crashed into the crowd of spectators. 77 people died.

Music helped memorialize the Holocaust. For example, the song “Peat Bog Soldiers” tells the story of the prisoners' everyday life, the camp, and their hopes for future liberation — their own and their country's. The music was composed by Rudi Goguel, a political prisoner of the concentration camp, and the lyrics were written by Johann Esser and Wolfgang Langhoff.

Yevhen Stankovych's requiem “Memorial Service for the Dead of Starvation” to the lyrics of Dmytro Pavlychko tells the story of the Holodomor. The Chernihiv-based rock band Natural Spirit also dedicated a song to this tragedy, the track is called “33 (Yellow Prince)”.

Chekson & Skhozha also released the song “Yellow Prince” based on the book of the same name by Vasyl Barka. The lyrics are filled with phrases from the novel, and the video is filled with symbols from it.

“Music can be a bridge to our memories”

In the context of war, music plays a role in both documenting events and uniting people. Military motifs were present in recruitment, rifle, soldier, and Cossack songs. They glorified important cultural and socio-political processes, and they also talked about losses.

For example, a song from the village of Novyi Burluk, the Chuhuiv district, the Kharkiv region:

“Oh, there's a fire on the mountain,
A Cossack is lying under the mountain,
Chopped up, shot,
It's covered with silk.”

Music is also used to honor memory: in classical works, dedicatory songs, requiems, and earlier in lamentations.

According to folklorist Nataliia Khomenko, lamentations used to be an obligatory element of the funeral rite. One of the parts of their text is the chanting of moments from the deceased's life. Nowadays, few people know how to lament, and these songs are hardly ever performed.

With the beginning of the Euromaidan in November 2013, Ukrainian music boomed and a new stage of Ukrainian creativity began. During the Revolution of Dignity, some songs were created as a reaction to the events. Others got a second wind. For example, the folk song “A Duckling Swims in the Tisza”. It was performed on the Maidan after the death of Belarusian Mykhailo Zhyznevskyi. It was his favorite song. Later, “A Duckling Swims” became a requiem and a symbol of the Revolution of Dignity.

According to psychologist Oleksandr Avramchuk, music can help to resist or adapt to shocks. Through it, we can express what we feel.

“Music can also be a bridge to our memories. For example, by listening to pieces that a person who has passed away liked, we seem to find a spiritual connection with them. Music can be a resource to cope with tension and feelings of loneliness. Often, people who experience loss notice that it is difficult for them to relax and withstand silence, but music distracts, calms, and sometimes motivates them to move forward,” the psychologist explains.

In February 2015, a 15-year-old civic activist, Danylo Didik, was killed in a terrorist attack during the Unity March in Kharkiv. In 2019, Ruslan Horovyi's musical project This is How Memory Works appeared, which to this day keeps Danylo's memory alive and shows how music can also be a form of resistance.

When Dania died, the management of the school where he studied promised to name the school in his honor. However, the matter did not move forward.

“In fact, they were waiting for those who cared to get bored and forget. Then I was looking for a reason to prolong this story so that it would not get lost in the information noise,” Horovyi said.

At the start of the project, Ruslan recruited friends, including Ukrainian musicians and artists. The result was more than 150 songs, all of which were always in memory of Danylo.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, many songs have appeared with lyrics by fallen artists, as well as dedicatory songs: to soldiers and civilians in general and specific people.

For example, Krykhitka and Hatespeech released the song “Under the Spring Rain”, dedicated to the artists who died as a result of the Russian invasion. The lyrics were written by Olena Herasymiuk, a poet and paramedic with the Hospitallers volunteer medical battalion, who can be seen in the video.

Serhii Lazanovskyi wrote a song dedicated to his friend Ivan Naumenko, who died at the front.

The Rock-H band released a new song “Daddy's Love” in memory of Oleksii Yanin, who was killed in Mariupol.

The singer Stasik (Anastasiia Shevchenko) released the song “Heroes Die”, which she dedicated to civic activist Roman Ratushnyi and all those who died in the war.

Jamala dedicated the song “My Brother” to her friend Seiran Kadyrov, who died at the front, and to others who died in the war.

Ivan Humoreska dedicated the song “Tomorrow's Day Shone” to his friend who died in the Kherson region in the summer of 2022.

There are hundreds of such songs.

“Music surrounds us throughout our lives and influences them. With the outbreak of full-scale war, “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow” sung by Khlyvniuk got a new lease of life. It is a march of the Sich Riflemen, which people sometimes do not know in full, but everyone sings that fragment.

It can be a memorialization of the war period. Every war has its own songs. And how this war will be remembered depends on the songs that appear. Songs help soldiers and the dead. I dedicated a song to the defender Ivan Bushchuk and I saw that people made videos about other soldiers based on its lyrics. So, people need it,” says musician and writer Ruslan Horovyi.

“Memorial songs can help to find hope in difficult times”

Psychologist Oleksandr Avramchuk says that music can become a symbol of saying goodbye to a person and helps to realize the readiness to move on:

“Music is part of the tradition in many cultures during a funeral or farewell ceremony. Studies of the experiences of bereaved people have shown that music or a song played during a farewell ceremony that was a favorite of the deceased person contributed to the emotional cohesion of the mourners.

Self-selected music at funeral ceremonies often has a symbolic function, helping to express the grief for loved ones. Thanks to this, the farewell ceremony itself could become a symbol of ‘walking together into the future’ with an appreciation of the will or meaningfulness of the deceased person's life.”

While living through the loss of consciousness, we are constantly trying to find an understanding of what happened. Music can be a source from which people draw resources in such periods, the psychologist explains:

“Music creates a kind of therapeutic effect during the ceremony of farewell and grief.”

According to Avramchuk, memorial songs can be both sacred and secular. They are often used to make the memory of a person more personalized and meaningful to the family.

And to prevent songs or musical pieces from becoming just a painful reminder of the loss, Oleksandr advises performers to choose a style of music that best reflects the character of the deceased. To capture important places, quotes, or symbols in the song that had special meaning for the deceased and their family. He also recommends inviting family and friends to share their memories and thoughts.

“Creating memorial songs is a way of honoring the memory of the deceased and preserving their image through music. They help to keep the memories of the deceased alive, pass them on to future generations, and maintain a spiritual connection. Memorial songs can be an important tool to find hope and courage in difficult times,” says Oleksandr Avramchuk.

The text was prepared by Memorial, a memory platform that tells the stories of civilians and Ukrainian soldiers killed by Russia. To report casualty data, please fill out the forms for both military and civilian casualties.

Author: Yana Ilkiv