Leonid Hrabovsky
Leonid Hrabovsky is a Ukrainian composer and music educator, born in Kyiv on January 28, 1935. He began studying piano at 16 and entered the composition faculty of the Kyiv Conservatory three years later. From 1951 to 1956, he studied economics at Kyiv University; from 1954 to 1959, he studied composition at the conservatory with Lev Revutsky and Borys Lyatoshinsky. His 1959 graduation work, Four Ukrainian Folk Songs for choir and orchestra, won first prize in a competition for young composers and received a positive assessment from Dmitri Shostakovich. Hrabovsky completed postgraduate music studies in 1962.
His works from this period reflect the influence of the musical avant-garde and include Symphonic Frescoes (1961), based on paintings by Borys Prorokov, and Five Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1962) for baritone and piano. He also explored twelve-tone composition in Four Inventions and Five Character Pieces for piano, both written in 1962. In 1960, he translated Hans Jelinek’s book Introduction to Twelve-Tone Composition from German.
In the second half of the 1960s, Hrabovsky was part of the informal Kyiv Avant-Garde group, whose members studied and used techniques associated with contemporary Western composers. He taught music theory and composition at the Kyiv Conservatory from 1966 to 1969. His works of the period include the one-act chamber operas The Bear and The Proposal (both 1963), based on plays by Anton Chekhov, and The Sea (1964–70), a melodrama for speaker, choir, organ, and large symphony orchestra. The Sea, based on Saint-John Perse’s poem Amers, received its world premiere at the Gaudeamus Music Festival in Rotterdam in 1971.
Hrabovsky moved to Moscow in 1981 and worked as an editor at the journal Soviet Music, later renamed Music Academy. He helped organize and was a member of ACMa-2. In 1989, he moved to the United States at the invitation of the Ukrainian Music Society; he lived in Brooklyn before moving to Jersey City in 2005. Later works listed in the article include Concerto Misterioso (1977), When (1987), the cantata Temnere Mortem (1991), and Voice 2 (1994), an obituary for Dmitri Shostakovich.