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Roman Turovsky-Savchuk

Roman Turovsky-Savchuk is a painter and lutenist-composer. He was born Kiev, Ukraine in 1961, and emigrated to New York City in 1979. He studied art from an early age under Mikhail Turovsky, his father (a prominent artist active in France and the U.S.A.). He continued his art studies in New York at Parsons School of Design, having also concurrent studies in Historical Performance (Baroque Lute) and Composition, under Patrick O'Brien, Pier Liugi Cimma, Leonid Hrabovsky and Davide Zannoni.

He began composing seriously in the early 1990s, simultaneously embarking on a career of a prolific figurative/representational artist-painter, and participated in many exhibitions. His first one-man show was held in June of 2006 in New York.

As a composer he largely limited himself to the instrumental idiom of the Baroque lute, eventually producing numerous instrumental and vocal compositions, some of which were premiered by Luca Pianca at several international festivals (Salamanca, Lisbon, Schwetzingen, Vilnius, Urbino and Paris).

As a performer he appeared as a lute soloist and continuo player with Julian Kytasty's "New York Bandura Ensemble".

Roman Turovsky-Savchuk is a founding member of Vox Saeculorum and The Delian Society, two international groups devoted to preservation and perpetuation of tonal music. He is brother-in-law of the sculptor and stage designer George Tsypin and brother of the poet Genya Turovskaya.

Since 1996 he has signed his musical works as "Sautscheck", a German transliteration of the second part of his surname, with various first names such as Joachim Peter, Johann Joachim, and Konradin Aemilius. His musical works achieved wide circulation under this allonym. This also caused irritation for a few musicologists who perceived his works as a malicious hoax because of their ostensibly baroque style, and led to a coinage of a new German word, "sautscheckerei", which denotes a musical or literary hoax.

"Cantiones sarmaticae et ruthenicae", a collection of 200 Ukrainian folk melodies in Renaissance Lute settings/intabulations by Turovsky, was published under the allonym "Ioannes Leopolita".

Early Music America, 2007 (summer issue), p.43 [Complete EAM interview]

• Polyhymnion
• Turovsky
• Vox Saeculorum

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