Yuri Markovich Butsko (28 May 1938 – 25 April 2015) was a Soviet and Russian composer. He was born in Lubny, Poltava Oblast, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the Second World War, his family moved to Moscow, where he attended a music school and later enrolled in the history faculty of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. He left after two years to pursue music.
After graduating from the choral department of the October Revolution Music College, Butsko entered the theory and composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory, studying composition with Sergey Balasanyan. He graduated in 1966, completed postgraduate study, and began teaching score reading and orchestration in 1968. He ended his teaching career as a professor in 2013.
His early recognized works, written while he was a conservatory student, continued traditions of Russian classical music, especially those associated with Modest Mussorgsky. They included the monodrama Diary of a Madman, after Nikolai Gogol, and the chamber opera White Nights, after Fyodor Dostoevsky. Works of the 1960s and 1970s also reflected the “new folkloric wave” in Russian music, including the cantatas An Evening Gathering and Wedding Songs, and the oratorio The Tale of Pugachev’s Rebellion, which was premiered in 2019.
Butsko developed a distinctive modal-harmonic and polyphonic system based on the principles of ancient Russian monodic church chant. Its central work was the Polyphonic Concerto: Nineteen Counterpoints for Four Keyboard Instruments, Choir and Percussion on Themes of Russian Znamenny Chant, which lasts about three and a half hours. He later incorporated elements of this system into his wider musical language and freely developed ancient Russian themes in his compositions. He did not compose liturgies or all-night vigil cycles, and avoided decorative stylization of church intonations.
In his later decades, Butsko favored large-scale instrumental forms. His output included seven large symphonies, folklore-based symphony suites, chamber symphonies, concertos for solo instruments and orchestra, and chamber-instrumental cycles. Significant vocal-symphonic works from this period included the oratorio Book of Chants, to poems by Nikolai Klyuev, and Canon to the Terrible Angel, Commander and Guardian, based on texts by Ivan the Terrible.
From the second half of the 1960s to the mid-1980s, Butsko worked extensively in theatre and film. He wrote music for productions at the Taganka Theatre, including Pugachev, Mother, and Hamlet, and at the Mossovet Theatre, including St. Petersburg Dreams and The Brothers Karamazov. His film work included music for the television serial The Road to Calvary and for the restoration of The Young Lady and the Hooligan. He also orchestrated works by Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Glazunov, and Lyadov for symphony and chamber orchestras.
Some of Butsko’s compositions, including large-scale works, remained unperformed and unpublished. He died in Moscow on 25 April 2015 and was buried in his parents’ grave at Vvedenskoye Cemetery.