Invented Folksongs is a brand new album by Ukrainian-Canadian composer and musician Anna Pidgorna, to be launched on Redshift Information November 21, 2025. The discharge, her first full-length album, will probably be out there as an LP or CD in addition to digitally.
Whereas her music has usually included parts of Ukrainian music, the discharge marks a shift for the artist who is essentially identified in Canada for her modern classical music. In Invented Folksongs, Anna delves extra deeply into her Ukrainian heritage.
Anna Pidgorna
Anna Pidnorna holds a PhD in composition from Princeton College, together with an MMus from the College of Calgary, and a BA from Mount Allison College. Her music has been acknowledged by two SOCAN Basis Rising Composers’ Awards.
Her compositions have been extensively carried out, commissioned, and recorded by ensembles and artists equivalent to So Percussion, Sandbox Percussion, Ensemble Mise-En, Soundstreams, 21C Pageant, New Music Concert events, Gryphon Trio, Skinny Edge New Music Collective, Architek Percussion, Ensemble Paramirabo, Katelyn Clark, Turning Level, Standing Wave, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Wild Shore Pageant, and Trio Klaritas.
Anna’s music was chosen to characterize Canada on the ISCM World New Music Days 2013 pageant in Vienna. She has written operas with author and librettist Maria Reva, one titled Plaything that was developed via the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes 2020 Award, and one other titled Our Trudy that was commissioned and premiered by the Advert Astra Pageant in Russell, Kansas.
As an undergrad pupil, she sang in a choir, and started to develop her vocal expertise, ultimately taking classical singing classes at Princeton alongside her composition research.
In 2012, with funding from Canada Council for the Arts and the Shevchenko Basis, she travelled to Ukraine to check and file conventional music practitioners.
In Invented Folksongs, she takes each her classical coaching and newer information of Ukrainian custom, and creates her personal distinctive sound — together with the language and pronunciation. In her notes, she writes,
“Having encountered many dialects and variations in pronunciation throughout my music gathering expeditions in Ukraine, I’ve freely performed with phrases to create my very own invented dialect utilizing vowels that really feel greatest in my mouth. The result’s the unrooted language of a transplanted little one with an imperfect reminiscence of a tongue that was solely form of native to start with.”
LV caught up with the busy Vancouver-based artist (the place she is Common Supervisor of Metropolis Opera Vancouver) to speak concerning the album.
Anna Pigdorna: The Interview
People music is one thing of an ambiguous time period. It may be used to speak about heritage music that has been handed down via generations by way of oral traditions. However, it may also be utilized by just about anybody who picks up an acoustic guitar, or musical devices related to varied ethnic traditions, and writes model new music.
“It means various things to completely different folks,” says Pidgorna. “For me, […] the rationale I name it Invented Folksongs, I’m utilizing the supplies and approaches of Ukrainian folks music,” she explains. “I’m drawing on that as a soil for creating mainly absolutely unique works.”
Taking that as a base, she pushes previous the strictly conventional by way of her coaching in Western classical composition. With regards to the vocals, she’s likewise mixing influences.
“I’m drawing on the Ukrainian folks singing fashion,” she says, “actually increasing the vary, going right into a extra operatic vary, whereas nonetheless actually reaching for that actually chesty voice.”
Throughout her journeys to Ukraine, she discovered that music schools at universities and conservatories usually incorporate distinct packages for classical and folks singing. “They’re saved very separate,” she notes. Classical singers, specifically, are likely to draw back from folks music. “They’re informed it’s going to break your voice.”
Throughout her personal coaching whereas at Princeton, she labored with a classical soprano who got here from a gospel background. “She had no downside reaching for that chest vary.”
Arising with a blended fashion wasn’t simple. “To start with if I actually used that chest voice, I discovered it tiring.” She says it took the vibrancy out of her chest vary. “Virtually like I took out all of the higher partials out of there.”
With time and observe, she realized more healthy approaches that made it a lot simpler to primarily alternate between and mix each methods. “I believe that’s a extra conventional method,” she provides, stating that modern singers outdoors the classical realm usually do use each approaches.
Drown within the Depth: Anna Pidgorna, voice and electronics; Mark Eichenberger, percussion; Matthew McBane, violin; Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, cello (2020):
Travelling To Ukraine
She made the primary journey in 2012. “At that time it was exploratory.” She spent her time travelling to completely different villages to file folks musicians and singers, and took a number of lessons at a conservatory.
“This was actually a visit to gather a bunch of fabric.”
It was the primary time she’d heard genuine conventional singers first hand. “To sit down subsequent to them and watch their mouths — which was actually useful,” she says. “At that time, I wasn’t actually planning on singing.” As her work progressed although, she started to really feel like she wished to compose her personal music.
“I wanted a singer who might do each. That’s a really inconceivable factor to search out. I needed to begin doing it myself.”
She loved the method of studying and stretching her vocal approach. “It made my composing actually embodied,” Anna says. “The singer and the composer in me had been actually pushing one another.” As she realized extra about singing, the composer in her would take over. “They’d inform one another forwards and backwards.”
The method of placing collectively the album took a number of years, and multiple go to. “I’ve been actively engaged on that course of from 2014 to 2020,” she says. The fabric for the album was written between 2014 and 2018, and he or she continued engaged on and revising materials for a while after that.
The album consists of 4 songs primarily based on her personal texts, together with two instrumental items.
“I consider them as mini dramas, monodramas,” she says of the songs, “after which two shorter instrumental items. I name them meditations. They arrive in between the items to offer you a reflective break.”
On the discharge, she’s accompanied by the Boston-based Ludovico Ensemble, together with percussion, cimbalom, ready piano, violin, cello, and bass.
She first turned concerned with the musicians at college. “The primary piece emerged [when] Princeton introduced in a visitor cimbalom participant to work with the composers who had been ,” she explains “It’s a Hungarian instrument that’s type of uncommon in North America.”
After a presentation concerning the instrument, college students within the composition program had been provided the chance to write down music for it. “That’s how I ended up with that first piece.”
One other piece was impressed by scenes from a novel. “The cycle developed piece by piece.” Different works had been commissioned by people and festivals. “The cimbalom participant really got here again and commissioned the final piece, Stuffed with the Moon,” she recollects. “We did a full size live performance with him and the Ludovico Ensemble in Massachusetts.”
Lyrics
Pidgorna wrote the phrases to the 4 songs herself.
“After I take heed to folks music, what I discover actually hanging, it’s this sharing of actually private tales.” People songs are about disappointment, relationships, work, troubles, and the realities of day by day life. “But it surely’s all informed via these symbolic metaphors.”
She notes that the songs could also be framed round tales about birds and vegetation, however they symbolize themes from very human tales.
“That’s how I approached the lyrics.” She included parts of her personal life, together with information gadgets that she discovered hanging. “However I formed it via these conventional metaphors, to disguise it a bit. It universalizes particular person tales.”
One of many songs comes from a shocking discovery she made in Ukraine.
“One of many items, Educate Your Daughters, it does mix an present folks music with unique materials,” she says. It’s primarily based on a well-liked fashionable Ukrainian folks music that talks concerning the true story of Oksana Makar, an 18 12 months outdated lady who was attacked by three males in 2012, raped, strangled, set on fireplace, and left to die. As a information story, it garnered worldwide consideration, and sparked outrage and mass protests in Ukraine on the time. In an all too acquainted story, solely one of many attackers was ever charged by police — the opposite two having influential dad and mom who had been former authorities officers.
The horrific incident occurred whereas she was in Ukraine, within the metropolis of Mykolaiv in Southern Ukraine, the area the place Anna is from.
“It profoundly affected me.”
In one of many villages she visited, she recorded a music that she says has a remarkably comparable storyline. She performed the recording for others, who acknowledged it as a music usually sung at weddings.
“That’s loopy to me.”
She had found a definite subgenre of people music that revolves across the abduction and rape of maidens.
“It’s actually disturbing,” she says.
For Educate Your Daughters, she wove the unique folks music into unique materials. “It’s virtually my misremembered model of that folks music.”
The Album
Invented Folksongs will probably be launched on Redshift Information.
Anna Pidgorna In Toronto 2026
Toronto audiences will get an opportunity to expertise Pidgorna in efficiency in 2026.
Anna was named as one of many winners of Soundstreams’ 2025/26 New Voices Curator Mentorship Program. She’ll be curating one of many predominant stage live shows on Might 9, 2026, titled In Terra Pax, and that includes, along with Anna on vocals, Steven Dann (viola), Anna Sagalova (piano), Ensemble Soundstreams, and conductor Tania Miller.
- You will discover extra particulars and tickets [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 a long time, and a inventive writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
