Anna Pidgorna’s bold voice and creative compositions generate miniature operas whose elaborate structures stoke the music’s intrigue.
~ Release date November 21, 2025 via Redshift Records ~ courtesy Riparian Media
‘Folk music’ is an interesting piece of terminology because of how slippery it can be. On one hand, it can refer to popular forms passed down through an oral tradition, often without clear authorial attribution. On the other, it’s applied to everything from singer-songwriters to any non-western traditional music (including classical ones.)
The debut full-length of Vancouver-based composer and vocalist Anna Pidgorna, Invented Folksongs, probes this very contradiction through the lens of her Ukrainian heritage. Pidgorna is a fgure that is most often associated with contemporary concert music, a winner of two SOCAN Foundation Emerging Composers’ Awards that holds a doctorate from Princeton’s composition program. Her work has been commissioned, performed and recorded by major organizations, ensembles, and performers such as So Percussion, Sandbox Percussion, Ensemble Mise-En, Soundstreams, 21C Festival, New Music Concerts, Gryphon Trio, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Architek Percussion, Ensemble Paramirabo, Katelyn Clark, Turning Point, Standing Wave, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Wild Shore Festival, and Trio Klaritas. Her music also represented Canada at the ISCM World New Music Days 2013 festival in Vienna.
Pidgorna has long incorporated musical elements that refect her ancestry, however around 2012, things started to shift after she received funding from Canada Council for the Arts and the Shevchenko Foundation to visit Ukraine to study with and record practitioners of folk idioms. Where her prior approach had been to access quotations via existing transcriptions, following this trip, she sought a more embodied understanding that captured the nuance of timbre and ornamentation.
Her research also ignited her interest in performing. Throughout her undergrad, she had sung in choir, but visiting Ukraine prompted her to begin developing her voice with more enthusiasm, bolstering self-guided explorations with classical singing lessons through Princeton. Ultimately Pidgorna found a deeply personal approach to vocalization, taking aspects drawn from Ukrainian folk, but pushing these gestures past their traditional bounds, and blending them with classical and contemporary singing techniques. She has even made the pronunciation her own. “Having encountered many dialects and differences in pronunciation during my song collecting expeditions in Ukraine,” she writes, “I have freely played with words to create my own invented dialect using vowels that feel best in my mouth. The result is the unrooted language of a transplanted child with an imperfect memory of a tongue that was only sort of native to begin with.”
Her idiosyncratic vocal approach matches the compositional mindset found on this release. Invented Folksongs (composed from 2015-18) consists of four songs ranging from nine to eleven minutes based on texts by Pidgorna herself plus two intervening instrumental “meditations” lasting around three and a half minutes apiece. Pidgorna’s bold, sonorous voice is accompanied by the Ludovico Ensemble, whose present incarnation consists of percussion, cimbalom, prepared piano, violin, cello, bass, each of which has an analogous instrument in Ukrainian traditions.
The resultant music isn’t easily classified and this is its strength. It’s neither contemporary music peppered with folk tropes, nor folk with fancied-up arrangements. Instead, Pidgorna manages a thorough and thoughtful hybrid of the sounds, shape and ethos of these two worlds, where neither genre feels like the dominant one. These pieces are expressive and generously melodic, and therefore fly in the face of the still-persistent fear of Romanticism in the New Music world, yet little about them is remotely related to 19th century aesthetics. Their emotional heft emerges from the raw, driving delivery from both Pidgorna and the members of the Ludovico Ensemble, who play as though they’ve inhabited this invented tradition for generations. It’s also in how this approach so easily melts into softer or more melismatic passages.
Pidgorna’s compositions may eschew the familiar formal clarity one often fnds in even the most intricate folk musics, but this does not detract from their potent visceral impact. They’re more like miniature operas whose elaborate structures stoke the music’s intrigue—a feature that is further enhanced by her deft timbral interplay. Throughout the album, Pidgorna takes her skillful approximation of rustic playing styles and smears it gently toward the realm of extended techniques (yet, crucially, without obliterating its resemblance to traditional musicianship). Even her lyrics are built from folkloric imagery, yet portray stories rooted in contemporary feminist subject matter— antiquated gendered pressures in society, queer female sexuality, as well as the bleak true story of Oksana Makar, which Pidgorna has woven throughout a popular folk song on “Teach Your Daughters.” The album’s visual dimension drives this home.
Illustrator Olha Kriuchkovska hails from Pidgorna’s own hometown of Kherson, and had to fee the Russian occupation in 2022. She has been displaced since that time, living in Sweden where a group of fellow Kherson artists ended up after being taken in by an artist residency. Roksolana Uhryniuk’s graphic design extends the red vein-like lines found in Kriuchkovska’s images, joining them all into one line, refecting the music’s vulnerable intensity while connecting the various threads of the poetry.
Invented Folksongs is a record that is as powerful as it is imaginative, especially in the era of Putin’s ongoing military encroachment on Ukraine. Exploring diasporic identity through the bending of traditional musical materials, it also makes an articulate case for the notion, as Pidgorna states that “folk traditions are not museum pieces, they are living, breathing practices that are constantly morphing and reinventing themselves in response to their time and circumstances.”
Anna Pidgorna is a Ukrainian-Canadian composer, vocalist, multidisciplinary artist and producer with a sharp eye for society’s absurdities. Her work perches on the intersection between personal and political, fusing elements of classical technique with Ukrainian folk idioms and natural soundscapes. Anna travelled through Ukraine in 2012, 2013 and 2023 to record folk music and absorb the atmosphere of a country at war, the research resulting in a number of vocal and instrumental works. Collaborating with writer and librettist Maria Reva, Anna has written several operas including “Plaything” developed through the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes 2020 Award, and “Our Trudy” commissioned and premiered by the Ad Astra Festival in Russell, Kansas. The duo are currently developing the opera theatre play “The Cellar” with Sawtooth Duo, supported by Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and Shevchenko Foundation.
Anna is also working on a theatrical collaboration with Irish composer Brian Irvine, co-produced by Red Note Ensemble in Edinburgh and Soundstreams in Toronto. Her work has been commissioned, performed and recorded by soloists, ensembles, presenters and festivals in Canada, USA, Uruguay, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Poland, Ukraine and South Korea. Anna is the founder of Pickle Underground, a not-for-proft arts organization designed to promote and develop Ukrainian music and other art forms in Canada. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MMus from the University of Calgary, and a BA from Mount Allison University. She took part in Beth Morrison Projects’ Producer Academy in 2024.
The Ludovico Ensemble is a Boston-based chamber ensemble specializing in modern music. Founded in 2002 by percussionist Nicholas Tolle, the group is known for its carefully curated programs focusing on specifc and often unusual instrumentations. From 2007-2014, the group held the position of Ensemble-In-Residence at the Boston Conservatory. In 2010, the group released its frst album featuring chamber music by the late Dana Brayton, former composition teacher at the Boston Conservatory. The Boston Globe hailed Ludovico’s recording of Marti Epstein’s Hypnagogia as one of the best classical albums of 2015, and Alex Ross of The New Yorker called it a new release of interest. In 2016 the group released its third album featuring the music of Composer–In–Residence Mischa Salkind-Pearl.
The group consists of many of the best freelancers and new music specialists in Boston, and its instrumentation varies wildly from concert to concert as the repertoire demands. The group’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fctional medical treatment featured in the Anthony Burgess novel and Stanley Kubrick movie “A Clockwork Orange,” in which the protagonist is subjected to a classical conditioning regimen that induces nausea at the sight of violent or exploitative acts, but also, inadvertently, to the music of Beethoven.