GéNIA was born into a musical family. “The piano was always in our house. It was like the normal thing to do and have, so I was just playing.” Growing up in Ukraine she began her studies by the age of four, taught by her grandmother. She began learning Mozart, Bach, Czerny. “Practice wasn’t my favorite, but I loved performing.”
GéNIA continued her studies at a school for gifted children and went through the Soviet system before coming to the Guildhall School of Music. “Going to London felt very unusual. It was like going to the moon, you know? I got a scholarship to the Guildhall and of course I went.”
At first, GéNIA did a lot of chamber music and especially the harpsichord, though she found herself really missing the piano and eventually returned her focus there. She found success on the concert stage appearing in venues across the UK, Europe and the USA but alongside the virtuoustic classical material, GéNIA found herself drawn to contemporary music. “For many, many years, I was performing a lot of contemporary music, collaborating with living composers and went as far as to do electronic music… that was kind of where life took me.”
GéNIA commissioned 30 new pieces from composers such as Gabriel Prokofiev, Howard Skemptom, Patrick Nunn and more. “What I like when you collaborate with someone is that they may write you something, but then they will come and we will sit in my studio, or I will come to them, and we will say, ‘Okay, this is working, this is not working. Can we change it? Can we do it like this?’ This was incredibly interesting for me, because I’ve learned a lot, because it’s one thing to perform music by a composer who is already dead and another to perform by a composer who is alive, especially if they can change music according to what you want them to do.”
GéNIA’s own journey into composing came about in an unusual way. She was performing a private concert that showcased her improvisational skills and impressed an audience member who approached her after the show. He asked her if she composed and GéNIA admitted she did not. “That’s a shame. If you wrote your own music and we liked it, we would have played it in the whole Caffe Nero.” GéNIA was stunned because Caffe Nero was huge and she realized the possibilities that could open to her if she began to write original music. “I made a lifestyle change, I moved to Paris, I had an opportunity for months, and started to compose.”
Composing came easier to GéNIA that she would have imagined. “In fact, one of the tracks is pure improvisation. I haven’t changed a note, it’s just how it came out and so a couple of tracks are like that. That’s how I started then, of course, I developed other skills, but that was the beginning.”
Another factor that would heavily influence her style was GéNIA’s introduction to yoga. “When I was a student, as many students I practiced, practiced, practiced for hours. Not surprisingly, I started having some pain in my back.” She ended up seeking treatment from a kind physician who treated her for free knowing she was a student but she still knew it was unsustainable. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m in my early 20s and I’m already going to a doctor once a week, this is definitely wrong!’ I was looking for ways to just really work on my back and someone suggested yoga. So that was my introduction to yoga and that was the beginning of my love for yoga. I got an amazing, amazing teacher, because you know, the key is your teacher. She basically totally healed my back.” GéNIA combined her love for music with her new passion for yoga, studying to become an instructor herself and creating Piano-Yoga®. She has since held retreats for other musicians sharing her skills.
Another important part for GéNIA was to create music with a message. When the war in Ukraine broke out, she immediately went into action, creating a charity (Support Kharkiv) for her city and supporting other fundraising efforts. Composer Paolo Cognetti was so touched that he arranged “Bella Ciao” , a famous Italian song for her. The pair agreed to release the single with all the proceeds going to support GéNIA’s charity. “My charity supports children mainly, well citizens, but recently through the last year and a half, I was dealing with children and helping kids from the Kharkiv region.”
GéNIA’s upcoming single “Prana” will be part of a new album. “It’s going to have 16 compositions and each composition, when put all together, creates like one long piece. The idea is to create this kind of oasis of calm, and something people can use to kind of relax, repose. If they just want to listen, it’s something they can use to really chill.” Drawing on her experience as a yoga practitioner, she is focusing on the importance of breath. “Different pieces are going to be connected with different, for example, breathing patterns. So this one is based on a balanced, equal breathing technique and is quite simple. What you breathe in, you breathe out in the same rhythm. And if you listen to this piece of music, it was created exactly with that kind of scene in mind.” She hopes to create videos to accompany with the music to encourage viewers to utilize them to experience calm in their daily life.
Listeners can stream “Prana” on Spotify September 8th.
