Composer, Conductor, Religious Figure. Considered one of the foremost Ukrainian composers of the 20th Century, and a key influence in his country's short-lived independence during the late 1910s. Kyrylo Hryhorovych Stetsenko was born in Kvitkiv and graduated from Kiev's Saint Sophia Seminary in 1903. He did not take holy orders but remained affiliated with the Orthodox Church as a teacher and choir director. Around this time he met the Ukraine's greatest contemporary musician, Mykola Lysenko, who encouraged him to compose. Stetsenko was a devoted nationalist and after the 1905 Russian Revolution he clandestinely published the 1862 Ukrainian National Anthem, a work banned by the ruling Czarist government; for this and other political activities he was ejected from Kiev in 1907. No longer able to support his family through teaching, he became an orthodox priest in 1911 and was assigned to a remote village in the southwestern Ukraine, where he wrote some of his finest music. With the collapse of the Romanov Dynasty and establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic in February 1917, Stetsenko was summoned back to Kiev and appointed head of the Ministry of Education's Music Section. Proclaiming "It is high time Europe discovered the Ukrainian soul", he formed a national choir under conductor Oleksander Kolshyts to spread Ukrainian music and poetry abroad, while he himself led a second choir to promote unity throughout the country. By 1920 the Bolsheviks under Lenin had crushed the new Republic and Stetsenko resumed the priesthood, taking a post at the Saint Paraskeva Church in Vepryk, on the southern outskirts of Kiev. Despite growing Soviet persecution he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church in 1921. He died the following year at age 39, while ministering to the sick during a typhus epidemic. His gravesite was unmarked for many years. Stetsenko's serene, beautifully harmonized music, nearly all of it vocal, is rooted in the Ukraine's native folk and liturgical traditions. It includes a Requiem (1914), dedicated to the memory of Lysenko, "The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom" (1918), a Vespers (c. 1919), some 100 motets and Psalm settings, incidental music for a dozen plays, and 42 secular songs. Most of it was unknown even in his homeland until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.