Our Notes & References

Uncut and unopened example of this extremely rare edition: we could find no other copies worldwide, including in Ukraine and Poland.

Ukrainian composer and conductor Yaroslav Yaroslavenko (1880-1958), along with Anatole Vakhnianyn and Filaret Kolessa, founded the music publishing house “Torban” around 1905 in Lviv, then part of Poland. Torban produced around 300 musical works, primarily by Galician composers, but with the arrival of Soviet rule in Western Ukraine in 1939, it was gradually shut down.

“Particularly prolific in the genre of compositions for brass bands,” Yaroslavenko created “numerous patriotic marches for the defenders of Ukrainian statehood — the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the Ukrainian Galician Army” (Sionchiyk, our translation). This edition of two military marches for trumpet orchestra—”March of the Sich Riflemen” and “The First Zaporozhian Cossacks”—is printed in a compact oblong format, likely intended for use in the field. The cover also advertises other pairs of marches by Yaroslavenko from the same series, as well as arrangements of these marches for piano.

We could not locate either any other examples from the series, and found only one holding of Yaroslavenko’s marches in a different format: Harvard’s collection has several individually printed Ukrainian marches for piano (each consisting of 4 pages, 31 cm), also published by Torban, including the “March of the Sich Riflemen” and “The First Zaporozhian Cossacks”. According to the advertisement on the wrappers of the present copy, Torban priced these individual issues lower (1.5 zlotys) compared to the current edition, which is marked at 5 zlotys a copy.

Bibliography

Sionchiyk O. V. “Narodno-pisenna tvorchist u repertuari dukhovoho orkestru” // Istoriia stanovlennia ta perspektyvy rozvytku dukhovoii muzyky. Zbirnyk naukovykh prats. Vypusk 7, Rivne, 2015, p.83.