Kliment Kvitka

Kvitka, Kliment Vasil’evich 

Born Jan. 23 (Feb. 4), 1880, in Kiev; died Sept. 19, 1953, in Moscow. Soviet musicologist and folklorist. Husband of Lesia Ukrainka.

Kvitka received his musical education at the Kiev School of Music. He collected more than 6,000 Ukrainian, Russian, Byelorussian, and other national folk songs. In 1920 he became a member of the Folklore Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and a professor at the N. V. Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama in Kiev. From 1922 to 1933 he headed the Musical Ethnology Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1933. In 1937 he founded the Center for the Study of the Musical Art of the Peoples of the USSR, serving as its first director. He is one the founders of Soviet musical ethnology. He wrote many works on the theory of Ukrainian musical folklore, studies on folk instruments, manuals, and textbooks on methodology. Kvitka was awarded two orders and various medals.

WORKS

Izbr. trudy po muzykal’noi etnografii, vol. 1. Moscow, 1971.

REFERENCE

Bachyns’kyi, L. O., and H. L. Kashcheeva-Kvitka. “Vydatnyi ukrains’kyi muzykoznavets’-fol’kloryst K. V. Kvitka.” Narodna tvorchist’taetnohrafiia, 1958, no. 4.