Roman Turovsky-Savchuk

In 2011 Turovsky-Savchuk contributed the soundtrack to the Iryna Korpan's documentary "She Paid The Ultimate Price", and in 2013 to the Marko Robert Stech's Georgy Narbut episode in the KontaktTV Toronto (OMNI TV (Canada)) series "Eyes on Culture" №55.

He also undertook research into the history of Torban, a Ukrainian musical instrument of the lute family, and wrote the chapter on it for the 2011 edition of "Die Laute in Europa".

As a performer, Turovsky-Savchuk appeared as a lute soloist and continuo player in the Early Music line-up of Julian Kytasty's "New York Bandura Ensemble" and "Radio Banduristan". Roman Turovsky was a recipient of the 2008 NYSCA grant for the purpose of study of kobzar art with Julian Kytasty.

His works for lute achieved wide circulation under the allonym of Sautscheck and the pseudonyms "Ioannes Leopolita" and "Jacobus Olevsiensis". Musicologist Douglas Alton Smith perceived these works as malicious hoaxes and forgeries because of their ostensibly baroque or earlier styles. The controversy in 2000 over what some considered an outright hoax led to coinage of a new German word, Sautscheckerei, which denoted a musical or literary hoax.

Since 1996 Turovsky has signed his musical works as Sautscheck, a German transliteration of the second part of his surname as an allonym. Turovsky used a variety of constructions, such as Joachim Peter, Johann Joachim, and Konradin Aemilius, for first names attached to Sautscheck. He represented the works as newly discovered manuscripts by supposed 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century composers from several generations of the same family.

During the early 1990s, he worked at NYANA, a refugee resettlement agency in New York City (his co-workers there included people now prominent in the arts: theatre director Alexander Gelman, writer and director Todd Solondz, and writers Alex Halberstadt and Gary Shteyngart).

Turovsky began composing seriously in the early 1990s, simultaneously embarking on a career as a prolific artist-painter. He participated in many exhibitions. His first one-man show was held in June 2006 in New York, and the second in February 2013. Eight of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the International Marian Institute at the University of Dayton.

Turovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1961, when it was part of the Soviet Union. He studied art from an early age under his father, the painter Mikhail Turovsky and at the Shevchenko State Art School in Kiev. He also began to be interested in music in his teens. The family emigrated to New York City in 1979. They first lived in the Bronx. Turovsky continued his art studies in New York at the Parsons School of Design, studying concurrently Historical Performance (Baroque Lute) and Composition, under Patrick O'Brien, Pier Luigi Cimma, Leonid Hrabovsky and Davide Zannoni.