Her solo concerts and band projects have brought her to many festivals and concert halls in Germany , France , Israel , Afghanistan , and the USA . Sadovska has received a scholarship grant from the Earth Foundation in New Yorkm , a Künstlerstipendium from Staatskanzlei NRW / Germany , and a Fulbright fellowship , and was a scholar at the Princeton Atelier , a multidisciplinary artists program curated by Toni Morrison at Princeton University . She lives with her husband and two children in Cologne , Germany .
About Chernobyl . The Harvest , Sadovska writes :
" Chernobyl . The Harvest is a composition for one voice and string quartet , based on ancient ceremonial music of northern Ukraine and contemporary sound scales . In this ‘ pagan requiem ’ I used the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl as a starting point to experiment with destruction and creation of musical structures and stories .
“ I remember very well the days of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl . Nobody told the truth about what happened . The officials tried to convince us that they had everything under control , the workers celebrated their labor days in Kiev as if nothing happened two days before , and the evacuated people thought they get a free vacation for a few days . Nobody told them that they would never be back to their homes . Chernobyl is a strong symbol of disaster , of individual and collective tragedies . And it is still reality . The problem is not solved ; the destroyed reactor blocks are just locked in a concrete coffin that slowly comes apart .
“ I started with the working title Chernobyl – a pagan requiem , and in the process of creating the piece I realized that this term doesn ' t fully represent what I wrote . Chernobyl . The Harvest is dealing with memory of death , and yes , some of the material I use can lead us to pagan cultures . But I put the main emphasis on the question of how people get on with life after facing death and destruction . We harvest what we have sown , and we have to learn to live with it . Also I didn ' t want to stick too tightly to a musical form . I see myself more as a singing storyteller than a composer . The harvest songs I integrated in the piece were used by the farmer women to push the coming rain clouds away while they were working in the fields . Rain can destroy the harvest . After the Chernobyl catastrophe , we all were afraid of the clouds delivering radioactivity .
“ Chernobyl . The Harvest is arranged in four parts with a total length of 20 min . The first part draws a picture of a frozen landscape . I use a widow ’ s song to evoke the atmosphere of the alienation zone that still exists around Chernobyl , with its empty cities and abandoned villages .
“ The second part is like a danse macabre based on several ritual songs and text fragments of official announcement of the evacuation plan .
“ The third part follows the open structure of a lamentation ceremony in the Polesia region , where Chernobyl is located . On one special day of the year , women gather to lament at the graves of their ancestors . The words and the musical pattern they sing are improvised and very personal . Together they create a tremendous polyphony of mourning . I sing the names of evacuated villages that are now covered by the grasses .