Ukraine’s Kids Turn Drone Strikes Into a Symphony of Survival, Video

In the village of Kivshovata, south of Kyiv, a group of teenage musicians is scoring what their country has been hearing for nearly four years—air raid sirens, the growl of Shahed drones, the stutter of Ukrainian air defense—an initiative the orchestra described in a report by France 24 on November 5.

Drawing on the everyday soundscape of Russian attacks, the ensemble known locally as Harmonia has built a performance that starts with a calm Ukrainian night and then layers in the noises of war.

Most of the players are middle-school and high-school students whose homes and schools have repeatedly come under drone alerts.

Fourteen-year-old trombonist Rostyslav Musiienko told NPR that he knows the Shahed’s approach so well that he can reproduce it in rehearsal: “When it picks up speed, I hide because I’m scared,” he said, explaining that he then plays the same rising sound on his instrument.

Videos of the performance style—sometimes titled “Shahed Overture”—have circulated earlier on Ukrainian social media, including posts about Kyiv-region musicians who put the drone’s approach and the work of air defenses into a single musical overture.

“This composition reflects the horror that we now live in,” added local guitar teacher and co-author of the piece Dmytro Korniienko, describing why the orchestra moved away from prewar jazz and funk arrangements toward a program built out of the sounds of Russian strikes. 

For many of the young players, the project is not an art experiment but a form of testimony. Some of them play at soldiers’ funerals in the same week they rehearse the drone piece, and 20-year-old drummer Ruslana Halaziuk said simply: “You just stand there, and you just cannot hold back your tears.”

The musical heartbeat that closes the composition, conductor Neduzhyi explained, is meant to get louder “as a sign of life,” even though the children leave the ending open because, as of November 5, the war itself has no ending.

Earlier, it was reported that Ukrainians launched a youth‑led digital campaign “The Stolen Art Campaign” to correct the mislabelling of Ukrainian artists in major Western museums, combining activism, design and heritage‑research.

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