Roman Turovsky-Savchuk

Turovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1961, when it was part of the Soviet Union. He studied art from an early age under his father, the painter Mikhail Turovsky and at the Shevchenko State Art School in Kiev. He also began to be interested in music in his teens. The family emigrated to New York City in 1979. They first lived in the Bronx.[4] Turovsky continued his art studies in New York at the Parsons School of Design,[5] studying concurrently Historical Performance (Baroque Lute) and Composition, under Patrick O'Brien,[6] Pier Luigi Cimma, Leonid Hrabovsky and Davide Zannoni.

During the early 1990s, he worked at NYANA, a refugee resettlement agency in New York City (his co-workers there included people now prominent in the arts: theatre director Alexander Gelman, writer and director Todd Solondz, and writers Alex Halberstadt and Gary Shteyngart).

As a composer, Turovsky concentrated on the instrumental idiom of the Baroque lute[11] and the torban,[12] as well as viola da gamba and carillon. He composed over 1100[13] instrumental and vocal[14] works influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and the baroque.[15] Many of these were premiered by Luca Pianca[16] at several international festivals (Salamanca, Lisbon, Schwetzingen, Vilnius, Vicenza,[17] Urbino,[18] Metz and Paris), Roland Ferrandi in Corte, Simon Paulus at Wolfenbüttel and Jindřich Macek in Přibyslav, Kraty, Prague and Hvar.[19] He also collaborated with Paulo Galvão and Hans Kockelmans in a series of experimental works which they jointly composed. His works have been performed/recorded by Robert Barto,[20][21] Robert MacKillop,[22] Oleg Timofeyev, Massimo Marchese,[23] John Schneiderman,[24] Thomas Schall,[25] Trond Bengtson, Terrell Stone, Christopher Wilke and Bernhard Hofstötter[26] on lute, Angelo Barricelli[27] and Fernando Lewis de Mattos on guitar,[28] Ernst Stolz on viola da gamba,[29] as well as Hans Kockelmans and Olesya Rostovskaya on carillon. In 2011 and 2013 Turovsky was profiled in two 1 hour-long programs on the Dutch Classical radio-station Concertzender.[24][30] He also composed over 40 tombeaux dedicated to various cultural figures. These were described by Pablo del Pozo as being of "unquestionable musical quality".[31]

As a performer, Turovsky-Savchuk appeared as a lute soloist and continuo player in the Early Music line-up of Julian Kytasty's "New York Bandura Ensemble" and "Radio Banduristan".[32] Roman Turovsky was a recipient of the 2008 NYSCA grant for the purpose of study of kobzar art with Julian Kytasty.[33]

Roman Turovsky-Savchuk is a founding member of Vox Saeculorum[34][35] and The Delian Society,[36] two international groups devoted to preservation and perpetuation of tonal music. He was described as composer-extraordinaire[3] by the British author Suhayl Saadi.

In 2011 Turovsky-Savchuk contributed the soundtrack to the Iryna Korpan's documentary "She Paid The Ultimate Price", and in 2013 to the Marko Robert Stech's Georgy Narbut episode in the KontaktTV Toronto (OMNI TV (Canada)) series "Eyes on Culture" No.55.[37]

Turovsky's poetry translations (from Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other languages) have appeared in the literary almanacs Cardinal Points,[45] The Germ,[46] and various web publications. His translations of the early futurist works of Mykola Bazhan are included in the 2020 edition of Bazhan's "Quiet Spiders Of The Hidden Soul".[47]

He also undertook research into the history of Torban, a Ukrainian musical instrument of the lute family, and wrote the chapter on it for the 2011 edition of "Die Laute in Europa".[48][49]

• Early Music America, 2007 (summer issue), p. 43
• , D. Dominick Lombardi interview for Huffington Post
• "Roman Turovsky", EAM interview, Polyhymnion
• "Roman Turovsky", Delian Society Website
• "Lenten Meditation 5", Marian Meditations, University of Dayton
• Turovsky
• Scharffeneck collection of Contemporary Early Music – Turovsky
• Free scores by Roman Turovsky-Savchuk at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)