John Estacio

John Estacio (born April 8, 1966) is a contemporary Canadian composer.

Estacio was born in Newmarket, Ontario. Raised in the farming community of the Holland Marsh, Ontario, Estacio took piano and accordion lessons, and played church organ every Sunday. As a teenager, he created soundtracks for short student films, played trumpet, and performed in high school productions of Broadway musicals.

He majored in composition at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario studying with Glenn Buhr and Peter Hatch. He earned his post-graduate degree at the University of British Columbia where he studied composition with Stephen Chatman.

In 1992, his first major orchestral work, Visoes da Noite, won second-prize in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s Canadian Composers Competition. Saudades for orchestra was premiered at the WSO’s New Music Festival in 1993.

From 1992 to 2000, Estacio was Composer in Residence of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. During his residency, Estacio created several orchestral works, participated in novel audience outreach programs, and created the Young Composers Project. A Farmer’s Symphony (1994), Borealis (1997), Flights of Fancy (1999), Frenergy (1998), Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello (1997), Variations on a Memory (1995), Victims of Us All (1996), Wondrous Light (1997) and The Twins and the Monster (2001) a children’s tale for actress and orchestra with text by Tololwa M. Mollel, were all written for the ESO.

From 2000 to 2003, Estacio was Composer in Residence with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Calgary Opera. He composed Solaris (2000), Bootlegger’s Tarantella (2001) and Spring’s Promise (2004) for the orchestra, and between 2001 and 2003 he wrote the opera Filumena (based on the life of Filumena Lassandro) with librettist John Murrell. Premiered in Calgary, the opera has been performed at the Banff Centre, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, and by the Edmonton Opera, where it was filmed for television broadcast on the CBC television network.

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