Katherine Pukinskis graduated from UChicago in 2016 with a PhD in composition and a minor field focus in ethnomusicology. During her time on campus, she sang in Chapel Choir and frequently collaborated with Director of Choral Activities James Kallembach.
On February 21st, Motet Choir will perform Pukinskis’ work Trīs dainas, no Mēness un Saule. Learn more about this piece, Pukinskis’ experiences composing for UChicago choirs as a composition student, and more in this interview.
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James Kallembach programmed your piece Trīs dainas, no Mēness un Saule for the upcoming Motet Choir concert. How did you and James connect during your time as a student? In what ways were you involved with choral groups on campus?
Since choral singing was such an important part of my own development as a musician, it was important to me to keep singing through graduate school. When I started at UChicago, I performed regularly with the Chapel Choir, who sings services on Sunday in Rockefeller Chapel. The first time James approached me to write for the choir was in my third year, asking for a companion piece for a concert where Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vespers were the anchoring composition. For that concert, I composed Marta Sniegs, a setting of a beautiful Latvian poem about the snow falling in the month of March. Because I was singing with the musicians who performed the concert every week, I knew their voices well and took full advantage of all we could do as an ensemble. James took incredible care with that piece, really getting to know the music in a way that anchored and elevated the performance from the choir. From then, I continued to write for choirs under his direction while at school, with a three-movement work called Water on the Thirsty Land which celebrated the collaboration between UChicago and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole Massachusetts; and my dissertation composition, And it was Quiet, a 40-minute work for choir and chamber orchestra. Each time I started a project I knew that James understood my creative voice in a way that would yield exceptional results for the choir. I knew my work was in good hands if he was on the podium. It was incredibly valuable to have that kind of support and advocacy from James at a time where I was developing my creative voice.
Trīs dainas, no Mēness un Saule is a setting of three Latvian dainas. Can you explain what a daina is?
A daina is a short Latvian folk poem, usually two or four lines long. These poems were passed down orally, often sung, so each one has taken on text and melodic variations and evolution over the centuries. Krišjānis Barons began cataloging these songs (text only) on small pieces of paper at the turn of the 20th century, and his records are stored in a wooden cabinet at the National Library of Latvia, literally called a Cabinet of Folksongs (Dainu skapis). The texts have also been digitized and are now accessible without having to visit in person. Some 1.2 million dainas have been preserved, which makes it an incredible document of oral tradition.
It is often said that Latvians have a song for just about anything, and most of that “anything” is covered in dainas. There are songs about youth, marriage, and death; about nature, spirituality, and morality; there are songs about picking mushrooms in the forest, washing clothes, and birds chasing one another around a tree. There are, of course, songs about the sun and the moon.
What are these particular dainas about? How did you choose to convey this meaning musically?
The three dainas I included in this set aren’t connected to one another thematically beyond their reference to the sun and moon. They are a trio whose texts I simply enjoyed for their evocative imagery and invocations of Latvia’s pagan deities, including these two celestial bodies.
In each song, I wanted to capture certain elements that identify Latvian folk tunes: mostly stepwise motion moving against a drone, register-contained melodies, and time signatures that ebbed and flowed to match text and syllabic emphasis of the language. These more traditional sounds were then combined with my own contemporary voice.
In the second movement, the Moon is out at night, counting the stars to make sure that they are all present. In the middle ground at the opening of the piece, there are methodical repetitions of small ascending musical gestures, first in the sopranos, singing without text, and then percolating through the other sections of the choir. I meant for these to provide a consistent, slow effect of counting: a million things, one by one. As the piece progresses, the text actually begins to include numbers—one, two, three—alternated with the words “beautiful stars” repeated, and the numbers get higher—ninety-eight, ninety-nine— as the piece builds to its climax.
Another example of the musical connection to text is in the third movement; I leaned on the golden imagery to pursue a sound world that was both warm and shining; lots of small intervals packed together, bookended vertically by more stable intervals in the chord voicings, which relax out into consonant sonorities.
You have multiple choral works based on Latvian texts, and one of your main areas of scholarly research is choral traditions in Latvia. What sparked your interest in Latvian music?
I grew up with parents and grandparents that immigrated to the United States from Europe, so my childhood was filled with foods, language, songs, and traditions that were part of both Latvia and Switzerland. In college, my dad mentioned a big song festival that happened in Latvia every five years, and as a choral singer through and through, my curiosities were sparked immediately and I started looking up as much information as I could find about these events. As a composer, I am always thinking about how who I am shows up in my creative work; that I could balance my creative practice with a research practice which broadened and supported my understanding of how music “works” in the world has been a key part of the person I have become. Pursuing research alongside composition has also provided access and methodologies for exploring aspects of my heritage and ancestry through music. One of the reasons I chose to study at UChicago was to pursue a minor field focus on ethnomusicology with Phil Bohlman. I was able to conduct extensive fieldwork in Latvia during my PhD and not only did it fuel a research career which exists alongside and as part of my creative work, it really shifted how I think of my role—limits, affordances, and responsibilities—as a composer.
On your website, you refer to yourself broadly as an “engineer,” since research is such an integral part of your work. How do your composer and scholar sides complement each other?
As I continue to compose, teach, and research in and around music, I feed the hunger to explore–from as many angles as I can–what makes music “work:” what makes it stick, how does it move us and how does it outlast us, how is it used for purposes bigger than performance?
Learning about how other people make, share, pass on, and invoke music in environments that aren’t familiar to my own lived experience has had an astonishing impact on my creative work. Ethnomusicology removed the composer from the center of how I saw music working. It asked me to think of the agency and value of music makers, to pay attention to how performers and communities took ownership of a composition. It showed me that the piece is one part of a much larger context, and that as a composer, I was only a partial owner of that work’s life. That the music is both historical artifact and current snapshot, and the music lives because it is living; it is actively performed in-time, and always as part of a larger contextual trajectory.
Do you have any upcoming compositions or research projects you’re excited about?
I’m finishing up a work for piano quartet that will premiere in May this year with performances in San Antonio and Pittsburgh by the Agarita Chamber Players. It’s a sixty-minute work that intersperses new music with narrative text gathered from interviews I’ve held with medical experts in reproductive endocrinology. The piece is called One in Four, One in Eight and situates the deeply bodied and socially stigmatized experiences of infertility and pregnancy loss with clinical, medical research and information associated with the conditions. As someone who is still—and often—the only woman in a room full of composers, the piece claims space for topics, bodies, and voices who have been historically discouraged, left out, or felt like they had to take on an incredible experiential weight alone. It is new music, feminism, and science combined at a time where it couldn't be more important—and scary—to be extra loud about all of it.
When you’re not composing or researching, what do you like to do in your free time?
I love to be outside, particularly in the colder months. Getting to be in nature is the ultimate reset for me, and I know that if I find myself tilting off my axis, staring into a great distance of trees will help me calibrate. Many faculty in the Music Department will be happy to know that I have continued baking all this time; I used to bring a lot of my dessert projects to seminars when I was in school.
Do you have any advice for current UChicago students?
Not all spaces were built with you—your body, your ideas, your goals—in mind; this doesn’t mean you don’t belong or don’t deserve to be there. If you want to be in that room, claim that space. (And if you don’t want to be in that room, that's okay, too.)
Remember to look at the horizon (literally, long distances) every once in a while.
Stay hydrated.