Wytwycky, Wasyl

Composer and musicologist Wasyl Wytwycky (b. 1905, Kolomyiia, Ukraine, d. 1999, Summit, USA) was born into a family of teachers spent part of his childhood in Prague. He studied at the Kolomyiia Gymnasium, the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where he completed a doctorate in 1932. He taught at the Music Institute in Przemyśl and worked for the Ukrainian Publishing Institute in Lviv. During the Second World War he moved to Austria. Following the war, he lived in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria, before immigrating to the United States and settling in Detroit in 1949.

As a composer Wytwycky was interested primarily in chamber music, composing works for string quartet, piano trio and four-hands piano, as well as choral arrangements, incidental music and a ballet. Wytwycky published over 250 musicological articles and wrote monographs about composers Michael Hayvoronsky and Maksym Berezovsky.