Turning the pages back... December 24, 1897 (12/19/99)

Turning the pages back...

December 24, 1897

Pavlo Matsenko was born in the town of Kyrykivka, Okhtyrka county, about 50 miles west of Kharkiv. He served in the armies of the dying Russian empire, and the evanescent Ukrainian National Republic. Managing to escape internment, he fled to Cyprus, and eventually made it back to Eastern Europe, settling in Prague in 1924.

He arrived just in time for the burgeoning of Ukrainian émigré life in the Czech capital. Matsenko studied at the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute (1926-1928) and then earned a doctorate in musical pedagogy in 1932 at the Prague Conservatory of Music. During his doctoral studies, he wrote and published arrangements for a full divine liturgy for mixed choir (1931).

Four years later, he was on the move again, this time in advance of the tumult that would engulf Europe. In 1936, Matsenko emigrated to Canada and settled in Winnipeg, then the pre-eminent center of Ukrainian Canadian life.

He became active in the Ukrainian National Federation, and initiated and coordinated various courses in higher education for Ukrainian cultural activists. In 1944 he became one of the co-founding members of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center in Winnipeg, since popularly known as Oseredok, and a year later strongly supported the establishment of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now Congress).

Matsenko also resumed his liturgical arranging, this time producing a work for three women's voices (1948), as well as treatments of various other religious texts, and a wide range of songs and carols, and published biographies of the composers Dmytro Bortniansky (1951) and Fedir Yakymenko (1954). He also published his correspondence with the composer Oleksander Koshetz.

In 1956 he began teaching at St. Andrew's College at the University of Manitoba, and two years later he traveled to Edmonton to serve as rector of the Ukrainian Orthodox St. John's Institute until 1961. He returned to Manitoba in 1963, to lecture at St. Vladimir's College in Roblin, a post he held until 1972.

In 1968 he published "Narysy do Istoriyi Ukrainskoyi Tserkovnoyi Muzyky" (Studies in the History of Ukrainian Church Music), and his retirement from teaching appeared to redouble his efforts in publishing.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, he published a number of arrangements and studies of the divine liturgy and Ukrainian religious chants.

Pavlo Matsenko died on March 8, 1991, in Winnipeg.

Source: "Matsenko, Pavlo" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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