Vasyl Yemetz. Podebrady. 1925-1927. Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive
The Cossack bandura players served Ukraine not only with Cossack sabers and rifles. They were able not only to sing and play banduras but also to give their lives so that the immortal glory of Ukraine could live on.
Vasyl Yemetz
Vasyl Yemetz was a bandura player, teacher, and director of a bandura band.
He was born in the Slobozhanshchyna region (eastern part of modern Ukraine) to a Cossack family. He learned to play the bandura from blind kobzars. He adopted the manner of the famous kobzars Pavlo Hashchenko and Ivan Kuchuhura-Kucherenko, who often visited the Yemetz family. In 1911, he entered Kharkiv University, Department of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. In the summer of 1913, he traveled to Kuban, to Yekaterinodar (now Krasnodar), where he organized the First Kuban Kobzar School. He was forced to transfer to Moscow University after participating in protests against the ban on honoring the memory of Taras Shevchenko in Kharkiv. In Moscow, he successfully performed at the All-Slavic Concert (1914), played at the Bolshoi Theater, and taught bandura.
After graduating from the university, he returned to Ukraine and taught in Sosnytsia, Chernihiv region. In January 1918, as a member of the UPR army, he took part in the defense of Kyiv from the Red Army of Mikhail Muravyov.
He worked at the Ministry of Public Education under the Hetmanate. In 1918, with the assistance of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, he organized the first chapel of sighted bandura players in the history of modern Ukraine.
In late 1919, Yemetz emigrated to Europe, where he studied music at the Prague and Berlin Conservatories. In 1923, at the invitation of the Ukrainian Public Committee, he moved to Czechoslovakia and performed in camps for interned Ukrainians. In Prague and Poděbrady, he organized a bandura playing school; in Prague, he headed the Second Bandura Choir (1924). As a solo bandura player, Yemetz toured most of Western Europe and America, performing on famous stages and in elite salons in Paris.
In 1936, he moved to Canada and then to the United States. After emigrating from Kyiv, Vasyl Yemetz brought his Ukrainian bandura overseas. He lived in Los Angeles in the United States and became the first bandura player to perform in Hollywood. In 1952, the Hollywood company Capitol Studios released a record with recordings of Ukrainian Hutsul dances, kolomyikas, and Cossack dumas performed by Yemetz. In the United States, he realized his dream of “making our national instrument accessible for playing classical music.” Yemetz created an enlarged type of bandura, which had 62 strings and a range of 5 chromatic octaves. He successfully toured Mexico and Canada.
Vasyl Yemetz is the author of the book “Kobza ta kobzari” (Kobza and Kobzars, 1923) and other works on kobzars. The bandura player died in 1982 in Los Angeles, buried in Winnipeg (Canada).
