Filaret Kolessa

Filaret Mykhailovych Kolessa (Ukrainian: Філарет Михайлович Колесса) (1871 – February 4, 1947) was a Ukrainian ethnographer, folklorist, composer, musicologist and literary critic. He was a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1909, The Free Ukrainian Academy of Sciences from 1929, and the founder of Ukrainian ethnographic musicology.

Biography

Filaret Mykhailovych Kolessa was born in the village of Tatarsk (now the village of Pishchane, Lviv oblast). He studied at the University of Vienna under Anton Bruckner from 1891 to 1892 and completed his studies at the Lviv University in 1896. Filaret taught in high schools in Lviv, Stryi, and Sambir. He worked with Ivan Franko, Mykola Lysenko, Lesia Ukrainka. In 1918 he defended his dissertation at the University of Vienna and received the title Doctor of Philology. He studied the rhythms of Ukrainian folk songs of Galicia, Volhyn and Lemkivshchyna. From 1939 he was a professor at the Lviv University, from 1940 the director of the State museum of Ethnography in Lviv, director of the Lviv section, of the Institute for Art studies, Folklore and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (from 1940), and a participant at international conferences of musicologists and philologists at Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, and Antwerp.