Marjan Mozetich

Marjan Mozetich (born 1948) is a Canadian composer. Born in Gorizia, Italy to Slovenian parents, Mozetich moved to Hamilton, Ontario in 1952, where his father found work as a machinist. He began studying piano, which started his musical training, and later studied composition with Lothar Klein and John Weinzweig at the University of Toronto, from which he received an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto Diploma in 1971 and a Bachelor of Music degree in 1972 in composition and piano. With the help of the Canada Council he then continued his musical studies in composition privately in Rome, Siena and London with Luciano Berio, Franco Donatoni, and David Bedford. Mozetich has written music for theatre, film and dance, as well as many symphonic works, chamber music, and solo pieces. He has also written compulsory competition pieces for the 1992 Banff String Quartet Competition (Lament in the Trampled Garden) and the 1995 Montreal International Music Competition (L’esprit Chantant for violin and piano). He received a fellowship from the Istituto musicale F. Canneti to be present at a seminar in Vicenza, Italy. Co-founder of Arraymusic in Toronto, Mozetich served as their artistic director from 1976 to 1978. After his work with Array, he worked for some time at the University of Toronto music library, and he then became a freelance composer for a living. Mozetich moved to Howe Island, near Kingston, Ontario, and has taught composition at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 1991 to 2010. He has won several prestigious awards, including the first prize in the CAPAC (SOCAN)-Sir Ernest MacMillan Award. His major compositions include Fantasia... sul linguaggio pertuto, and Postcards from the Sky.

Mozetich's friends and family were not interested in music, so he discovered classical music on CBC Radio by himself. He was astounded by his discovery. His first loves were the romantics-Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. He felt that his own writing became romantic, too. He also first heard on the radio what was considered then as “super-modern pieces”, and these astounded him as well. They put his mind in a totally different perspective, which was almost a science-fiction feeling. He then started improvising some of his own "super-modern pieces" because he always preferred improvising to practicing. However, he lacked the knowledge of how to make the connection between playing the notes and putting them down on paper.

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