Sonevytsky, Ihor

Sonevytsky, Ihor [Соневицький, Ігор; Sonevyc'kyj], b 2 January 1926 in Hadynkivtsi, Kopychyntsi county, Galicia, d 23 December 2006 in Lexington, New York State, USA. Composer, musicologist, conductor, and teacher; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1977; son of Mykhailo Sonevytsky. He studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich (diploma, 1950) and the Ukrainian Free University (PH D, 1961). Emigrating to the United States after the Second World War, he became a cofounder of the Ukrainian Music Institute of America as well as president and artistic director of the Music and Art Center of Greene County, New York State. His compositions include the opera Star, the ballet Cinderella, incidental music for numerous theater plays, a Piano Concerto in G Major, variations and miniatures for piano, approximately 60 art songs for voice and piano (including cycles to texts by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Vasyl Symonenko), the cantata Love Ukraine, and church music. He wrote musicological works, such as the studies of Artem Vedel (Artem Vedel' i ioho muzychna spadshchyna; Artem Vedel and His Musical Legacy, 1966), Nestor Nyzhankivsky (Kompozytors'ka spadshchyna Nestora Nyzhankivs’koho; Compositional Legacy of Nestor Nyzhankivsky, 1973), and Zinovii Lysko (Muzykolohichni pratsi Zinoviia Lys’ka; Musicological Works of Zinovii Lysko, 1976), and edited the second edition of Mykola Hrinchenko’s Istoriia ukraïns'koï muzyky (History of Ukrainian Music, 1961) and coedited (with Nataliia Palidvor Sonevytska) the Dictionary of Ukrainian Composers (1997). A monograph about him by Stefaniia Pavlyshyn was published in Lviv in 1995.

[This article was updated in 2015.]