Music for These Troubled Times

A new album by the Ukrainian harpsichordist Dmytro Kokoshynskyy, released on Fuga Libera, Music for These Troubled Times takes as its starting point an ancient idea: that of music capable of acting upon the soul, calming anxieties, but also revealing its shadowy areas. The reference to Robert Burton, the celebrated seventeenth-century English writer, and to his Anatomy of Melancholy thus permeates the whole programme: in Renaissance England, marked by the upheavals of the Reformation and by religious uncertainties, melancholy was not merely a state of mind, but a way of thinking about the world.

The album brings together several major figures of the English keyboard, from Thomas Tallis to William Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons, in a programme that alternates between grand polyphonic architectures, contemplative pavans, hypnotic grounds and variations on popular melodies. Four works form its core: Tallis’s monumental Felix Namque I, the anonymous A Ground, Bull’s In Nomine with its singular metre, and KHORA by the Ukrainian-Dutch composer Maxim Shalygin, conceived as a bridge towards a contemporary form of melancholy. Through this dialogue, Dmytro Kokoshynskyy does not seek to make the English Renaissance a closed world, but rather to hear within it an anxiety close to our own, resonating in echo.

The project also carries a more personal dimension. The harpsichordist explains that this music came to him at the time of Russia’s invasion of his country in 2022, offering him a kind of refuge. Far from being a mere tribute to the English virginalists, Music for These Troubled Times therefore proposes a listening experience in half-tones: a journey through melancholy as a poetic force, but also as a space of intimate resistance, as though these pages from Elizabethan England could still speak today to those who seek, in beauty, shelter from the disorder of the world.