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Released in November 2023, Emmanuel Vukovich’s debut album Resilience is the culmination of Vukovich’s reflection on his own roots, and humanity’s capacity for resilience.
“When I was young, my father would play the accordion and sing Croatian folk songs,” says Vukovich. “He passed away suddenly, two months before recording this album, and has been very present throughout this journey. I feel that his strong belief in traditional values, often in direct conflict with contemporary identity, led me to this project. Resilience has been a search for a better understanding of who I am, where I come from and where I am going.”
Born and raised in Calgary to a Croatian-Canadian father and German mother, Vukovich has always felt a deep connection to his cultural and agrarian heritage. The generations of farmers in his family inspired his interest in local, sustainable agriculture and led him to study at McGill University’s School of Environment.
Resilience, released by HitMusic Lab, produced by Leaf Music and distributed by Warner Music Canada, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, is largely centred around and inspired by Belá Bartók’s research, and transcriptions of folk music. Bartók is famous for the ways he combined western and eastern folk traditions—tonal, modal, and atonal systems, within the framework of modernist Western music composition. Bartók found inspiration in polymodal oral folk music, whose roots largely predate the western Common Practice Period (1600–1900).
Resilient Earth was composed for Vukovich by American composer Sheila Silver during the COVID pandemic. The work consists of four solo violin caprices—Chipmunks & the Owl, Stillness by the Pond, Teeming with Life and Lost Nigun—each of which represent one of the four elements. “The earth, which has the ability to sustain us all, is incredibly resilient and will nurture us if we nurture it,” writes Silver.
The album also features Patina, a solo violin caprice of timbral virtuosity by Juno Award-nominated Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri, and the Hindustani-inspired Sonata for violin and piano, by Juno Award-winning Canadian-Sri Lankan composer Dinuk Wijeratne, performed with Canadian pianist Katherine Dowling.
The album centres around Bartók’s Solo Violin Sonata, which includes the world première of three of Bartók’s historic transcriptions of Turkish, Romanian & Serbian-Croatian Folk Melodies. These were arranged by Vukovich for violin, voice, and hurdy-gurdy with Canadian baritone Philippe Sly. Resilience was recorded at Domaine Forget de Charlevoix by tonmeister Martha de Francisco and audio engineer Haruka Nagata. The album is currently being remixed for Dolby Atmos Immersive Audio by John DS Adams in Halifax.
Vukovich first became aware of Bartók’s historic collection of field recordings and original manuscript transcriptions of folk melodies from across Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Turkey during his doctoral studies at Stony Brook University. “We all know Bartók was a pioneer in ethnomusicology,” says Vukovich. “I assumed there were a couple of hundred pages of manuscript somewhere, but when I started researching seriously, I realized it was much bigger than that. The breadth and depth of Bartók’s research is staggering; there are volumes of tabulators where he analyzes the syllables, pitch range and rhythmic structure of each melody. Bartók believed this to be his most important contribution to the future evolution of music.”
The Resilience album is the first in a series of recordings that aim to bring Bartók’s historic collection of research—held at Columbia University’s Performing Arts Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Harvard University’s Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, and the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest—into the recording studio, and onto the concert stage, for the first time.
Much like Bartók, Vukovich aims to connect apparent polarities. Whether straddling music and organic farming, or researching oral tradition and digital innovation, Vukovich’s journey has been “inspired by those who have attempted to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”
An avid performer of J. S. Bach’s solo violin music, Vukovich considers both the baroque master’s harmonization of more than 400 medieval Lutheran church melodies, and Bartók’s exploration of timbre, rhythm, melody, and harmony in the oral tradition of folk music, to be great pillars of modern classical musical language.
For Vukovich, the new frontier in contemporary music is inextricably connected to the traditions of folk music from around the world. Drawing from a vast repository of musical source material, Vukovich echoes his musical and spiritual inspiration in these words: “Bartok’s approach leans towards connecting more deeply with tradition, going farther back in time to move into the future. The tree can only grow tall if it has strong roots.” He adds: “There’s no other way to put it.”
Along with the album, the limited-edition handbound booklet, made in Montreal by Book Art, comes in a Joseph Beuys-inspired, French-poplar wooden Intuition Box, handmade by Jean-Charles Roussel in Überlingen, Germany. It features artwork by Mi’kmaq artist Teresa Marshal and American artist Mary Frank.
Winner of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Emmanuel Vukovich is the recipient of McGill University’s inaugural Golden Violin Award in 2007, and a three-time recipient of the Canada Council Instrument Bank including a 1690 Nicolò Amati and a 1752 G.B. Guadagnini. His education includes degrees in violin performance from the Juilliard School (Pre-College) with Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki; McGill University (B.Mus.) with André Roy and Denise Lupien; New England Conservatory (M.Mus.) with Lucy Chapman, Soovin Kim and Donald Weilerstein; and Stony Brook University (D.Mus.) with Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker of the Emerson Quartet, whose teacher Oskar Shumsky worked with Bartók.
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Viktor Lazarov is an interdisciplinary musicologist and pianist specializing in
performance practice analysis and contemporary repertoire by Balkan composers.
Laureate of the Opus Prize for the “Article of the Year” awarded by the Conseil québécois de la musique in 2021, Viktor has performed and lectured in Austria, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, the United States, and published in CIRCUIT and La Revue musicale de l’OICRM.
Viktor holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Montreal, an M.Mus. and a Graduate Diploma in Performance from McGill University, a B.Mus. from the University of South Carolina, and Graduate Certificate in Business Administration from Concordia University.
(Photo: Laurence Grandbois-Bernard)
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