styles emerging from Western Europe at that time. Legacy Censorship and revival Performances of Vedel's music were censored and the publication of his scores was prohibited during most of the 19th century. Distributed in secret in manuscript form, they were however known and performed, despite the ban. Hand-written variations of Vedel's music appeared, as conductors amended the scores to make them more suitable for unauthorised performances. Tempi were changed and modal textures, the level of complexity of the music, and the formal structure were all altered. The hand copying of Vedel's music led to the creation of versions that were notably different from his original scores. Vedel's compositions were rediscovered during the early 20th century by the conductor and composer Alexander Koshetz, at that time the leader of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy's student choir, and himself a student. They were first published in 1902. Koshetz, one of the earliest conductors from Ukraine to attempt to revive performances of Vedel using the autograph scores, noted that "the great technical difficulties of solo parts... and the need for large choruses" made his works difficult to perform in public. Koshetz toured Europe and America, conducting the Ukrainian Republican Chapel in performances of Vedel. Koshetz's revival of Vedel's music was banned by the Soviets after Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1922. Unlike many of the sacred works written by Western composers, Orthodox sacred music is sung in the vernacular, and its religious nature is visible and tangible to Orthodox Christians. Because of this, Soviet anti-religious legislation prohibited Russian and Ukrainian sacred music from being performed in public from 1928 until well into the 1950s, when the Khrushchev Thaw occurred, and Vedel's works were once again heard by Soviet audiences. The gap of nearly two centuries when Vedel's music was forgotten adversely affected the development of Ukrainian church music. Vedel made an important contribution to late 18th-century music, but his accomplishments were largely undocumented and so were not realised. Early attempts to produce a narrative of Vedel's life and work based on the recollections of his contemporaries were only begun after they themselves had died, and this led to contradictory accounts of his life. The most important studies about Vedel produced in 19th and early 20th centuries belonged to musicologists as Askochensky, , Vladimir Stasov, and Pyotr Turchaninov. Some of these authors, such as Askochensky, were representatives of the Russian national movement; according