Classically (Un)Trained

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

To see images pertaining to this episode (including Darja's social sculpture End of the World Bread) you can watch the YouTube version: https://youtu.be/x3mV2gaGj-4

Darja Lukjanenko is a Ukrainian visual art student based in Prague, Czech Republic, who, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, started giving lectures about Ukrainian art to the public to amend what she perceived as a pervasive ignorance about Ukrainian heritage and the sovereignty of its art.

During our interview, Darja and I sat next to her “social sculpture” called End of the World Bread. It’s a table with a white tablecloth and on it some six loaves of bread. The soil baked into the bread was collected in Kiev by another Ukrainian artist, Bohdana Zaiats, on the first days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Darja and I talk about bread as a universal symbol of home, an open letter Darja wrote to a major Czech arts organization since the beginning of the war, the potentially problematic use of the word “decolonize” in the context of post-Soviet countries, and the artists social responsibility, among other things.

Darja’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darjalukjanenko

Music for this episode is by Sasha Lukjanenko, from Darja’s project called Lullaby for Plevel: https://vimeo.com/476913174

More about this podcast: onthevergetrilogy.com

Whenever I pitch the Artists on the Verge podcast, I’m forced to use the term “indie artist” because I can’t seem to find another shorthand for the kinds of artists I’m speaking to. It's a term which isn't perfect and does have some baggage, so here I explain what I mean by it and why I think it's particularly important to talk about this kind of artist, now. 

🎥 This Snippet is also available as a kind of video essay on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Unhh2ENsOhU

For more about this podcast and related blog and YouTube channel visit onthevergetrilogy.com. 

Follow on instagram at @soprano_on_the_verge

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

Vivian Säde is a twenty-four-year-old Estonian/intercontinental filmmaker in the very beginning of her career. I was connected with her by another guest to this podcast, Malena Dayen (whom you can hear in episode 4), when I was looking for someone to work with on a short film. I found that Vivian’s sensibility, unpretentiously influenced by pop culture, is a perfect counterbalance to a potentially overly-serious short musical film written around a monodrama for unaccompanied soprano by contemporary American composer Juliana Hall and text by Caitlin Vincent. 

Vivian and I talk about the difficulty of breaking into filmmaking, about walking the line between popular entertainment and high art, about the Americanization of storytelling, and about our joint film project and how it ties into issues of feminine identity in the public eye, among other things.  

Vivian's website: https://vivianfilms.com/ 

This is the first episode on which I used music from the Free Music Archive. The piece in this episode is by Monplaisir, called "Lid" from the album Kitchen Table: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monplaisir/ 

💋👁👂🏼 Website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/

This is my review of a very prescient book which aligns with the concerns of this podcast: William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020). I share one central insight of the book and also some notes I have as a European-based artist with a theater background. If I get just one person to read this book, I'll be happy! Here's a link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250125514/thedeathoftheartist

More about this podcast and the related blog and YouTube channel at onthevergetrilogy.com 

Find me on Instagram @soprano_on_the_verge 

This is a "snippet" episode in which I briefly expand on a theme relating to the Artists on the Verge podcast. For more about this podcast and related blog and YouTube channel visit onthevergetrilogy.com. Follow on instagram at @soprano_on_the_verge 

Learn more about the Artists on the Verge podcast hosted by Ema Katrovas at onthevergetrilogy.com

👀 Instagram: @artists_on_the_verge

About the host ✌🏼: www.emakatrovas.com

💌Newsletter (best way to stay in touch): https://mailchi.mp/45b402876641/artistsontheverge

😇 Become a patron and gain access to "backstage" videos: https://steadyhq.com/en/opera-on-the-verge

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQbWEV4vRw0R1my8zwswxFA

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

Daniil Posazhenikov is a young Russian composer, curator, performer and improviser who, over the past five years, has participated in gathering what he calls a kind of theater production company consisting of young Russian artists from various disciplines. The troupe’s name is Geometry of Sound and they have so far managed to put on about five productions a year in Russia. Their output is hard to pin down, but falls within the experimental and performance-art category and is often site-specific. 

I was connected with Daniil by another Russian artist who told me in a private message that she is embarrassed by her country and this made me reconsider the question which everyone seems to be grappling with, these days: Should the individual, even the individual artist, be held responsible for the politics or economics of the country they live in? We touch on in this question in our conversation with Daniil.   

Daniil and I talk about the need to connect with audiences, whether experimentation belongs in the education system, how indie performance art can fly under the radar of censorship, and what it means not to be needed by the system you are part of, among other things.   

Daniil's online profile: https://www.ulysses-network.eu/profiles/individual/28621/ 

More about Geometry of Sound (English version doesn't exist but you can use an online translator from Russian) : https://geozvuka.super.site/ 

🎵Music (Composer: Daniil Posazhennikov):  

Nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zXqayqgKhc 

Figaro Rave (theater music): https://soundcloud.com/posazhennikov/figaro-rave-new?utm_source=clipboard&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Fposazhennikov%252Ffigaro-rave-new 

G:Grammar: no online recording available  

Mirror (ballet music): https://soundcloud.com/posazhennikov/9-1m?utm_source=clipboard&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Fposazhennikov%252F9-1m

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

Richard Katrovas (a.k.a. my father) might be the luckiest person I know: He grew up in cars, the eldest son of a criminal who bounced checks while lugging his family of seven across the United States. They lived from motel to motel and car to car, fleeing from the police, which meant my father and his four younger siblings missed much of elementary school. The two times his father was in prison, the rest of the family lived with his mother on welfare in public housing. Long story short (and I describe his circuitous life path more in the intro) he became a poet, later an "ex-poet," and a creative writing professor, as well as co-founder of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, which sprouted from the 1990s American expat community in Prague, Czech Republic. 

I interviewed my father more or less on a whim, a day before he left to return from Prague to the US, after visiting my sisters and me for the holidays this past December. I didn’t necessarily plan to edit our conversation into an episode of this podcast, because I wasn’t sure If my father really fits what I would think of as an “indie” artist but what I realized is that our conversation is one about myths – personal myths, historical myths, cultural myths. My father’s story can be framed as a manifestation of the American dream or it can be understood, as my father has come to understand it, as a story of how lucky it was to be white in 1950s and 60s America. The format of this podcast, in which I ask artists to “sing a song of themselves,” to paraphrase Walt Whitman, really emerges from my growing up with my father's storytelling and self-mythologizing, and so his voice really does belong in the Artists on the Verge series.

I should also add that I was editing our conversation after Russia invaded Ukraine this February, and this loomed over our conversation, in retrospect, in the sense of how much we talk about the way history plays out in the lives of individuals. 

Richard Katrovas' website: www.richardkatrovas.com 

More about this podcast: 💋👁👂🏼: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

Violinist Elena Flores has been Musical Director of the legendary Odin Teatret since 2015, and became assistant director of the theater four years ago. The core of her creative philosophy is “discipline,” a word she said many times during our interview. She is also a self-described “rock star” who spent much of her career as a violinist in popular ensembles like Nidi D'arac. Elena has now spent half her career as an actor in the Odin Teatret ensemble and so her journey is also one of remaining open to the unexpected opportunities that present themselves, even when they are perpetuated by tragedy like, in Elena’s case, a devastating earthquake.

Elena and I talk about, among other things, the discipline necessary to become (and stay) an artist, how the institution of classical music might be brought into the 21st century, and how, after initial resistance, Elena began to see theater as a kind of musical composition.

Odin Teatret website: https://odinteatret.dk/  

🎵Music:  

Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKsMjp1X-vc 

Nidi D'Arac, Pizzica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCjHzAVSoxQ 

Nidi D'Arac, Ipocharia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DezHm-yPc9o  

💋👁👂🏼 Podcast website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/

Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/

Miro Tóth is a Prague-based Slovak composer, improvisor, and saxophonist who effortlessly moves between genres. He recently premiered his composition Black Angels Songs, Book 1, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, inspired by the famous George Crumb piece. He created (among other music theater works) a series of operas called Trilogy of the Rod in which a rod – an actual stick - becomes a kind of monolith vested with the absurd power of public officials. He’s also known as a film composer. On the other hand, he stood at the founding of an improvisation scene in Slovakia some fifteen years ago and has performed as a saxophone and vocal improvisor, in genres from jazz to free improvisation, across Central Europe. He is a tireless ensemble-founder – from our conversation I counted about five different ensembles he founded, focused on a range of different genres.

Miro was nice enough to speak English for most of the interview but we switch to Czech and Slovak in the last third of the interview, which is also when the most interesting conversation happens. I try dub over this to convey our conversation - for anglophone people it’s a kind of peek into a foreign culture and language.

Miro and I talk about how you must think of yourself as “nobody” in order to do your best work, the absurd power of public officials, the Czech new music scene, the Ostrava New Music Days festival without which the Czech New Music Scene wouldn’t be what it is, the cultural differences between Czechs and Slovaks, and the permeability of music genres, among other things.

Miro's website: https://miro2toth.wixsite.com/home/bio

Music in this episode: 

Black Angels Songs, Book 1 (Dystopic Requiem Quartet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_01mC57j0sA

"Uprostred tmy," Drť band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJf265-LzUk

Improv w/ Toth/Mazur/Dymny, a Polish-Slovakian trio which forms part of the NewEast project establishing an improv scene in the former Soviet Block : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf26CnMbLfw

💋👁👂🏼 Website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/