Scope and Content
The collection materials in the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute Ukrainian Cylinder Collection fall into two broad categories: 1) The ethnographic materials including sound recordings, music transcriptions, photographic images, cylinder notes, and 2) Publicity materials (news releases, announcements, presentation flyers, and various clippings that promoted the collection in the U.S. and Ukraine).
The ethnographic materials were collected during the early twentieth century (approximately 1908-1930s) by Ukrainian folklorists and musicologists, and include Ukrainian folk music traditions from various regions of Ukraine including the Kharkiv (Kharkov) region in what was then Soviet Ukraine and the Carpathian region of Eastern Galicia in Interwar Poland (1919-1939). These regions are now part of present day Ukraine.
The collection is primarily comprised of field recordings on wax cylinders held by the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute of Art, Folklore Studies and Ethnology (Kiev, Ukraine). There are approximately 400 individual song and instrumental compositions representing several genres and performance styles specific to Ukraine, including bardic traditions (secular and religious songs), seasonal ritual folk songs (winter carols, spring songs), life-cycle rituals (weddings, funerals, etc.), as well as ballads, and instrumental and ensemble compositions. Of significant note are recordings of blind minstrels (e.g., kobzari, lirnyky) probably made during the late 1920s and early 1930s before Stalinist purges, which destroyed the musicians and their distinct performance practices as well as the lives of many of the ethnographers who collected these song traditions.
The collection also includes musical transcriptions of some of the recordings made by folklorists of the period as well as accompanying ethnographic photographs of performers and their instruments dating from the turn of the 20th Century and from 1960. Additional documentation includes photocopies of slips of paper that were in the cylinder containers, many of which identify the contents of the cylinder.
Other photographs document Joseph Hickerson's trip to Ukraine and the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute in March 1994. Two videos, produced in 1994, promoting the institutional collaboration between the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute and the Library are also included in the collection.