On 7 October 2023, Kyiv-born, Tallinn-based violinist and electronic musician Valentina Goncharova “woke up in a bad state”, she says. “I felt something terrible was happening on our planet … I called my sister and brother in Ukraine. Nothing had happened to them. But I continued to feel some kind of uncontrollable violence.
“An inner impulse told me: ‘You must urgently return to work.’ I turned on the electric violin, put on Tibetan percussion instruments, and began recording,” she says. Then, later that day, she opened the news “and found out what had happened in Israel”.
These recordings became Campanelli, Goncharova’s first original album in more than 30 years. Her violin unspools its laments; her melodies unspool like vocal balladry. But Goncharova – framed by bookshelves, wearing a headband and robes – seems frank and unsentimental, even when talking about spiritual matters. “The idea was to convey the life story of a human being; how a person starts their life and how this life ends,” she says, speaking in Russian through a translator. “But when I finished, I understood that it was a story not just of one person, but it was about all of humankind.”
She may not have previously completed a new album in three decades, but Campanelli is Goncharova’s fourth release in five years, following two collections of archive recordings on Ukrainian label Shukai, and Ocean, her epic symphony for electric violin on Hidden Harmony which she began in 1988 and completed in 2022. Since then her music has been reviewed and internationally recognised in the press, and she has played live in cities including London and Berlin. These releases were a long time coming for someone born in Kyiv in the 1950s, who trained in Soviet Russia and has played music all her life.
She was singled out for her musical aptitude at a young age. “They would say that I had a very good memory, and I had perfect pitch,” she says. She was assigned the violin because of her small hands. She trained in Kyiv, then at the conservatory in what was then named Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and first played with an orchestra aged 12. After their studies, the young musicians were assigned to postings across Russia.
Goncharova and her friend, the composer and pianist Svetlana Golybina, “asked to go to Mongolia, Ulan-Ude city”, she says. It was then an autonomous Soviet republic, but more importantly, “it had the only Buddhist temple in the Soviet Union. It was the reason I wanted to go. We attended a congress of lamas and the Dalai Lama came. We felt their intentions, their interests. Since then Buddhism has always been very close to me. Traditionally speaking, I’m Catholic, but not strictly – I’m open to other religions and other mystical teachings.”
After a year in Mongolia, Goncharova returned to Leningrad, which gifted another life-changing experience: seeing Vyacheslav Ganelin’s free jazz trio at a festival. It opened her ears to wider sonic possibilities. “It seemed similar to what we studied,” she says, “but it was different. It was more holistic, more organic, more expressive.”
She fell in with the Soviet underground rock scene, including the collective Pop-Mechanika, and got to know composers including Sergey Letov. But in 1984 she moved to Tallinn with her husband, Igor Zubkov, and lost her connection to those scenes. “Free jazz wasn’t developed in Tallinn,” she says. “There was no audience and no musicians. I thought, ‘I have to start playing free jazz alone.’ I needed four or five ‘voices’. So my husband bought me a tape recorder.”
Goncharova and Zubkov are close collaborators. He is an engineer who helps to realise her musical visions by setting up ways to overdub with basic equipment, electrifying and building her string instruments, and constructing contact mics for them to record the sounds of household objects. She is clear that even with the electronics, she always wanted her violin to sound like a violin, but these bespoke modifications mean the tone of her playing is utterly distinctive, with a tactility like raw silk: fine and luxurious; soft but with grain.
The epic symphony Ocean is unquestionably her magnum opus, but after completing it in 2022 she stopped composing, finding that her ideas just wouldn’t coalesce – until Campanelli emerged fully formed. Ocean had a cosmic scope, articulating “the source of all forms that receive life within space and time. Ocean was all-encompassing – it was like the universe. So any other idea seemed too small next to it. It was difficult for me to get into a mood where another idea could become worthy – could look as global and as important as those ones.”
Relatively speaking, Campanelli’s quest to articulate life as a whole is almost provincial. The title means bells or bell-ringer in Italian (a language Goncharova speaks). It opens and closes with the gentle herald of struck Tibetan bowls, which give way to wavy glissandos and resonant strata of featherlight strings. “When we come to this world, something happens, some kind of contact is established between the highest realm and the physical realm,” she says. “Then when something happens in our life – something important – the sound of bell ringing is what we hear. When we leave this life, maybe that bell will ring a little bit longer, because it has to embody everything: what was at the beginning, what was in the middle and what is at the final stage. It’s not something that stops, it’s some sort of transition, maybe to an eternal life.”
Goncharova considers herself a pacifist. “Any war is disgusting to me,” she says when I ask about the ongoing conflict in her native Ukraine. “Over the last three years, I have realised life in the world has changed. It has changed for every person.” I ask if she considers her music to be spiritual. “Yes,” she says decisively. “But if I highlighted this, people might reject [my music]. They wouldn’t accept it. Those people who want it, they can find the spiritual in it. You can’t really live outside of the spiritual if you’re a musician.”
• Campanelli is out now on Hidden Harmony
