Hammered Tunes in Gold
- David Sercel
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
March 6th, 2015: I was a few months in on my adventure into the nation of Ukraine, a place I would call home for the next four years of my life. The place, the people, balanced up on the cusp of the Eastern Steppe of Europe—it all captured my heart and I've never quite got it back. Never asked for it back, actually.
On this particular day, I was out and about in the Ukrainian countryside exploring Kyiv's National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, named “Pirogovo.” Along for the adventure was Dan, a fellow American expat teacher and my roommate at the time, two of our students, Evgeniy and Denis, with their families, and Lena, a sharp-witted girl from Cherkasy down in the heartland of the great nation of Ukraine.
Propelled by rented bicycles, we launched into a day of exploration and sunshine.
Somewhere in the haze of the afternoon we stumbled upon an old man with a most fascinating musical instrument, producing hypnotizing melodies yanking at heartstrings you didn't know you had pulling you back to a distant Slavic blissful yesteryear. It was a Tsymbaly, a Ukrainian variant of the hammered dulcimer family, and its tones have tickled and haunted me ever since.
The unique, intricate shape and texture of the tsymbaly's hammers forming an interlocking puzzle box of musical texture has looped through my mind, picking up random steam and snacks along the way, and has ended up crawling out my fingers here and there over the years through music. But when it had sat and brewed long enough in my creative crock-pot, it came bubbling out in a few recent piano adventures...
...and suddenly I'm taken back to 2015 and that crazy American boy standing out in a field in Ukraine, hair blown wild in the wind, hearing the bliss in an old man hammering away the tunes, tangles, and trials of that great land caught teetering in the last few rays of golden sunlight there where Europe meets the East.
2015, Pirogovo, Ukraine
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