STEFANIA TURKEVYCH (1898-1977), celebrated as the first Ukrainian woman composer, was born to a family of musicians in Lviv. Turkevych was a pupil of Vasyl Barvinsky in Lviv before continuing her studies in Vienna with influential professors Guido Adler and Joseph Marx.

In 1925, she moved to Berlin where she studied with Franz Schreker and attended lectures by famed composer Arnold Schoenberg. She received a PhD in musicology from the Ukrainian Free University in Prague in 1934, with a dissertation on Ukrainian musical elements in the operas of Modest Musorgsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Mykola Lysenko.

Turkevych taught at the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music in Lviv (1935-39) and at the Lviv State Conservatory (today the Lysenko National Music Academy, 1940-44). She left Ukraine as the Soviet regime extended to Lviv in 1946 and emigrated to England, where she did some teaching and continued to compose. She died in Cambridge in 1977. Blending her training and life experience, her compositions walk a fine line between melodic folklorism and expressionist dissonance.