Obituary of Baycka Voronietsky

Baycka died peacefully on June 1, 2018 at Harbor Hill Center, Belfast, ME at the age of 78 after a five-year battle with spinocerebellar ataxia. She is survived by numerous friends in the Belfast and Orono areas, five nieces and nephews in Poland, and a legion of former students from her thirty-five years of teaching at the University of Maine. Born in 1939 on the eve of World War II to surgeon Wiktor Woroniecki and pianist Teresa Woroniecka (née Frąckiewicz-Radzimiński), a Polish couple then residing in present-day Vilnius, Lithuania, Baycka spent her early years in Gdansk, Poland, where she studied at Gdansk Conservatory of Music. At the age of 16, she moved to Warsaw, where she studied at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and completed her first master’s degree in piano performance. After graduation, as the winner of the Student Baroque Competition, Baycka received a scholarship to Venice and then the Rome Conservatorio “St. Cecilia,” where she continued her musical studies. During her twenties, she performed in countries including Denmark, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and her native Poland. In 1969, she emigrated to the United States and studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her second master’s degree in piano performance and pedagogy. In 1977, she visited Maine for the first time and fell in love with the state’s natural beauty. In 1978, she moved to Corea, ME, and began teaching at the University of Maine, where she became an Associate Professor of Piano. Throughout her life, Baycka’s passions were music, teaching, and nature. She was a vibrant performer, a dedicated teacher, and an ardent gardener. She loved long walks through the University Forest in Orono, as well as the beaches and trails of Belfast, and she planted and cultivated gardens everywhere she lived. Her appreciation of beauty—both in music and in nature—inspired everyone her life touched. She had a warm and generous heart, paired with a robust, quirky sense of humor. Throughout her life, Baycka considered funeral and memorial services to be “deadly boring,” and expressed a strong preference that no such event follow her own death. Instead, she preferred private, personal memorials, such as planting a tree or raising a glass of Shiraz. Donations in memory of Baycka can also be made to the National Ataxia Foundation and/or the School of Performing Arts at the University of Maine.