Yákiv Stepánovych Stepovýy (real name Yakymenko/Akymenko, October 8  1883, Kharkiv - November 4, 1921, Kyiv) was a Ukrainian composer, teacher and music critic. Younger brother of composer Fyodor Yakymenko.

Biography

He was born in 1883 in the city of Kharkiv. Yakov's father worked in the church choir, his older brother - Fedir Yakymenko - studied singing in the St. Petersburg court chapel and later became a famous Ukrainian composer.

Yakov was also admitted to the St. Petersburg Court Chapel, and during his stay in the chapel (1895–1902), he mastered the profession of a conductor, learned to play the piano, and the clarinet.

In 1909, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in the class of Mykola Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Lyadov.

With the beginning of the First World War, Stepovoy was mobilized into the Russian army and appointed as a scribe of the sanitary train.

In May 1917, the composer managed to free himself from military service in the tsarist army, and in the same year he became a teacher at the Kyiv Conservatory and the head of the Musical Drama and the State Vocal Ensemble.

After another concert trip, Stepovy unexpectedly fell ill with typhus and died in Kyiv in 1921. Buried at Baikovo cemetery.

Activity

Yakiv Stepovy is a representative of the Ukrainian musical intelligentsia of the first quarter of the 20th century, one of the founders of the national school of composers and the successor of the traditions of Mykola Lysenko. He is a master of solo singing, choral and piano works, the author of music collections for children, as well as a teacher of the Kyiv Conservatory, the founder of the State Vocal Quartet, the head of the national music section of the All-Ukrainian Arts Committee, a musical and educational figure, a propagandist of world classics in Ukraine.

Memories of the composer of the former artist of the Ukrainian Vocal Ensemble (first a quartet, and later an octet) under the direction of Yakov Stepovy Olena Akhmatova have been preserved.