The Southern Tier Singers Collective is shining a light on a long-overlooked Baroque composer with their upcoming concert, Unto Ages of Ages, featuring the sacred choral music of Mykola Dyletsky. Artistic Director William Culverhouse says his introduction to the 17th-century Ukrainian composer came entirely by chance.
“It’s a bit of a fun story,” Culverhouse recalls. “I was just doing some random YouTube surfing and came across one of those scrolling score videos. It was one of Dyletsky’s pieces, and I just fell in love with the sound at first listen. I went hunting for more, found a whole bunch, and that’s how it started—probably five or six years ago.”
Dyletsky, who lived around the same time as Monteverdi and Schütz, drew inspiration from the Venetian school of choral writing. “He was influenced by that polychoral, antiphonal style that Monteverdi and Gabrieli wrote for St. Mark’s Cathedral,” Culverhouse explains. “A lot of what we’re presenting is antiphonal music for double choir—an SATB group on each side of the space, tossing the musical footballs back and forth.”
But finding Dyletsky’s music wasn’t easy. “There aren’t any easily accessible scores,” says Culverhouse. “I found a few old Russian editions in Cyrillic and got in touch with conductors who had performed the music before. The Kyiv Chamber Choir was generous enough to share their materials, and I started making Latin-alphabet transcriptions from scratch for our singers.”
The language itself posed another challenge. “A number of our singers had sung in Russian before, but Rusyn—the liturgical language at St. Michael’s—is closer to Slovak,” Culverhouse explains. “Once we agreed on a Czech-style transcription system, the singers actually found it much easier to perform.”
While Dyletsky’s life remains somewhat mysterious, Culverhouse says what we do know is fascinating. “He was born in Kyiv, worked in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and ended up in Moscow. He’s most famous as a theorist—he described the circle of fifths decades before anyone in Western Europe did, in a treatise he called A Musical Grammar.”
The concert also carries a humanitarian purpose. “We’re celebrating his Ukrainian identity,” says Culverhouse. “All proceeds from the concert will go to Regenerate Ukraine, which assists with refugee efforts from the war.”
The Southern Tier Singers Collective presents Unto Ages of Ages: The Music of Mykola Dyletsky on Sunday, November 9 at 3:00 p.m. at St. Michael’s American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church, 296 Clinton Street in Binghamton. More information is available at southerntiersingers.org