Disciplined Happiness: Girl Drummers and the Spectacle of Social Reproduction in Soviet Kyiv

MUSICS ABROAD

SPEAKER: Maria Sonevytsky, Bard College

Across the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, Palaces of Pioneers provided after-school programs for children aged 9–14, aiming to cultivate ideal future Soviet citizens who would reproduce the revolutionary ideals associated with Lenin. Among the most ideologically charged activities were the drum and bugle corps—designated “ritual ensembles”—which provided the sonic and visual backbone for parades, state visits, and party commemorations. At the postwar Kyiv Palace of Pioneers—the central Pioneer Palace of Soviet Ukraine—this ensemble became a striking site of gendered musical discipline. Girls were trained as drummers and boys as buglers, producing a spectacle that synchronized strict musical and gendered roles. By the 1970s, the ensemble intensified this effect by recruiting twins and triplets, whose matching bodies amplified the impression of uniformity and discipline.

Drawing on archival materials and interviews, this lecture analyzes practices of bodily presentation, musical skill, and ideologically framed performance that attempted to condition children for a future of disciplined happiness—an affective reward tied to compliance and musical competence, but also to rigidly deterministic gender roles. This study demonstrates how musical mastery and gendered performance norms became a ritualized spectacle, molding the idealized citizen-girl into an agent of social reproduction and a model for the Communist future envisioned within the volatile political landscape of postwar Ukraine. 

About the Speaker

Maria Sonevytsky is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College, a musician, and a Visiting Associate Professor in Slavic at Harvard this term. She is the author of the books Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), and a forthcoming book on children’s musical culture at the Soviet-era Kyiv Palace of Pioneers. Sonevytsky has authored many articles and book chapters on subjects ranging from post-Chernobyl folklore revivals, to the Indigenous popular musics of Crimea, to the ambivalent feminism of Ukrainian Eurovision competitors. Her vocal trio Zozulka is premiering a new song cycle of old Yiddish and Ukrainian songs, Bereza/Beryoze, this fall.