Oleksander Koshetz

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Oleksander Koshetz (September 12, 1875 – September 21, 1944) was a Ukrainian choral conductor, arranger, composer, ethnographer, writer, musicologist, and lecturer. He helped popularize Ukrainian music around the world. (Ukrainian: Олександр Кошиць, Oleksandr Koshyts’, first name sometimes translated Alexander)

At one time, a performance of Koshetz’s Ukrainian National Chorus held the world record for audience attendance, excluding sporting events. George Gershwin is said to have based his song Summertime on a Ukrainian lullaby, Oi khodyt’ son, which he heard in a New York City performance by the choir.

[edit] Biography

Koshetz was born in the village of Romashky in Kiev Guberniya. He graduated from the Kiev Theological Academy in 1901, then studied in the Lysenko School of Music and Drama, 1908–1910. He taught choral music at Kiev’s Imperial Conservatory of Music, conducted the Sadovsky Theatre Orchestra, served as conductor and choirmaster of the Kiev Opera, and collected Ukrainian folk songs from central Ukrainian areas (notably around Kiev itself) as well as from the modern Russian area of Kuban, where he specially set out to see whether musical traditions of the Dnieper Cossacks are still present in their descendants, the Kuban Cossacks, who resettled there following the dissolution of the Zaporozhian Sich. In the latter case he too managed to collect a number of songs.

After World War I, Koshetz was the co-founder and Conductor of the Ukrainian Republican Capella (later renamed Ukrainian National Chorus). The choir toured Europe and the Americas in 1919–1924 and 1926–27, in support of the international Ukrainian community.

In 1917 Koshetz married a former student and singer in his choirs Tetyana Koshetz (1892–1966) who was later to become a vocalist in the Ukrainian National Chorus, voice teacher, and after 1944 curator of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg.

He moved to New York City in 1922 where he collected liturgical music, arranged and popularized Ukrainian folk music. Koshetz also documented the choir’s travels in the memoir With Song, Around the World (З піснею через світ).

From 1941 Koshetz spent the summer months teaching in Winnipeg, Canada, where he died in 1944 at age 69. The O. Koshetz Choir in Winnipeg is named in his memory.

It was Koshetz who introduced the song Shchedryk by Mykola Leontovych, at a concert in Kiev in 1919. Eventually the song became a Christmas classic under the name Carol of the Bells.

A unique concert titled the Unknown Koshetz was produced at the University of Manitoba on March 26, 2006. The concert featured the Olexander Koshetz Choir of Winnipeg performing Koshetz "choral orchestrations" of music of Hawaii, Scotland, Afro-Americana, and First Nations, sung in both English and Ukrainian translations.

On his 130th birthday, a commemorative concert was held in Uspenskyi Cathedral of Kiev Pechersk Lavra by the best graduates of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy under patronage of President Yuschenko and under blessing of Ukrainian Orthodox Church [1].

The personal archives of Olexander and Tetyana Koshetz remain at the Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

[edit] References

Koshetz, Oleksander (1952–1974) З піснею через світ: подорож української республиканської капелі (Z pisneiu cherez svit: podorozh ukrains’koi respublikans’koi kapeli), 3 volumes. Winnipeg, Культура і освіта (Kul’tura i osvita).