BRAMA, June 14, 2004, 9:00 am ET
Press Release
World Bandura Promoter Returns to Lviv
Memorial Plaque
Oleh Sozansky and Taras Lazurkevych
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In Lviv, on historic Market Square (Ploshcha Rynok), on Sunday, 13 June 2004, almost 5 years after the death of Mykola Dosinchuk-Chorny, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the building where he lived in the late 1930s.
Mykola Dosinchuk-Chorny was born in northwestern Ukraine in 1918, but relocated to Lviv in the early 1930s where he became an active participant in the Ukrainian student movement which had begun to fervently assert the rights of Ukrainians then living under Polish rule. He subsequently joined the anti-Soviet Ukrainian underground movement and was forced to flee to the West at the close of World War Two.
From his home in New York City, Mykola Dosinchuk-Chorny took up the cause of promoting Ukraine's cultural heritage, devoting his life to popularizing Ukraine's national instrument - the bandura. He established the New York School of Bandura in 1973 and in 1981 launched the publication of a special quarterly - Bandura Magazine, dedicated to featuring articles on Ukrainian music history as well as providing a forum for the exchange of information, music, ideas, and news among bandurists throughout the world. He traveled extensively throughout North and South America and Europe promoting the bandura. In the case of Ukrainian communities in South America, Dosinchuk-Chorny organized visiting instructors and the mass delivery of almost 300 instruments to meet the growing demand among youth to learn how to play Ukraine's unique stringed instrument.
When Ukrainian independence was restored in 1991, he began traveling throughout Ukraine gathering information about the bandura and the many performers scattered throughout the country, helping them self-organize and promoting their accomplishments through the press within Ukraine and abroad.
Several dozen people gathered for the unveiling ceremony, which included remarks by Prof. Vasyl Herasymenko of Lviv's Lysenko Music Academy and historian Bohdan Zheplynsky, and bandura performances by acclaimed musicians Lyudmila Posykira, Oleh Sozansky, and Taras Lazurkevych. Dosinchuk-Chorny's daughter, Lydia Matiaszek, who resides in Kyiv, also spoke to the gathering about her father's commitment to promoting the bandura and its rich heritage.
The plaque was designed by Lviv sculptor Mykola Posykira and architect Mykhaylo Fedyk. Building No. 36 on Lviv's historic, UNESCO-listed, Market Square (Ploshcha Rynok) dates to the Renaissance Period. Prior to the Soviet occupation of Lviv in 1939, it housed the Ukrainian Narodna Torhivlya (People's Trade) cooperative association.
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