Ukrainian Soviet choral conductor, music folklorist, teacher, amateur composer, music and public figure.
Father of the singer Zoya Haidai.
Biography.
Born on November 21, 1878 in the village of Dankivka, now a village in Chernihiv region.
He graduated from the regency courses at the Kherson Music School (1912). Conductor of the Volyn Enlightenment Choir (1910) in Zhytomyr, the first Ukrainian Choir (1919), the Volyn Choir (1919-1923), the Dumka Choir (1924-1927), the Ukrainian Leontovych Choir in Vinnytsia (1932-1933), the Ukrainian Choir in Moscow (1928-1930), the choir of St. Volodymyr's Cathedral, and the student choir of Kyiv University (1935-1939).
From 1920 he was a researcher at the Cabinet of Musical Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, 1930-32 - at the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, 1939-42 - at the Institute of Folklore of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1941-49 - head of the Department of Musical Folklore of the IMFE of the USSR Academy of Sciences. For some time he worked at the conservatory. He suffered repressions.
In 1914 he recorded more than 5 thousand folk songs, studied the folk music of the Balkans, the Greeks of Mariupol region, Ukrainian workers' songs, published the book "Samples of Folk Polyphony" (X., 1928, 1930), etc.
Author of spiritual compositions, songs and choruses to the words of Taras Shevchenko and contemporary Ukrainian poets, folk songs, music to the drama "Spring Fairy Tale" by O. Oles (1922-1924).
