Kytasty, Hryhorii

Kytasty, Hryhorii [Китастий, Григорій; Kytastyj, Hryhorij], b 17 January 1907 in Kobeliaky, Poltava gubernia, d 6 April 1984 in San Diego, California, USA. Banduryst, composer, and conductor. He studied at the Poltava Musical Tekhnikum (1928–30) and the Lysenko Music and Drama School in Kyiv (1930–5, under Mykola Hrinchenko, Lev Revutsky, and Viktor Kosenko). He was a member of the State Exemplary Banduryst Kapelle from its inception in 1935, serving as concertmaster and assistant artistic director (from 1937). In 1941 Kytasty was conscripted into the Red Army and captured by the Germans. He soon managed to escape and return to Kyiv, where he founded and became the first director of the Shevchenko Ukrainian Banduryst Kapelle, which reunited many of the original members of the State Banduryst Kapelle. This group was for a time interned in a Nazi concentration camp, but was subsequently allowed to tour Ukrainian Ostarbeiter camps in Western Europe. A displaced person after the Second World War, Kytasty performed as a soloist and with the kapelle throughout Western Europe, touring Ukrainian displaced persons camps and organizing bandura classes. He emigrated to the United States of America in 1949 and settled in Detroit with the entire ensemble, which was renamed the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus. He served as the conductor and director of the chorus to 1954, in 1958–9, and from 1967 to his death. Kytasty wrote countless original works and arrangements of folk songs for choir and bandura accompaniment, solo bandura, choir and piano, and bandura orchestra. He also composed several dumas and put the works of various Ukrainian poets to music, including Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Bahriany, Oleksander Oles, Borys Oleksandriv, and Vasyl Symonenko. Many of his compositions have entered the repertoire of almost every bandura ensemble in the West, especially the haunting instrumental piece Sound of the Steppe. Kystasty was a tireless propagator of the bandura music. He taught numerous courses and seminars on the bandura and influenced an entire generation of bandurysts in North America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Samchuk, Ulas. Zhyvi struny. Bandura i bandurysty (Detroit 1976)
Hurs'kyi, Ia. (ed). Zbirnyk na poshanu Hryhoriia Kytastoho u 70-richchia z dnia narodzhennia (New York 1980)

Wasyl Wytwycky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]