Jana Skarecky
Jana Skarecky is a Canadian contemporary classical composer of vocal and instrumental music – for solo instruments, chamber groups, solo voice, choir, and orchestra.
Jana was born in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on November 11, 1957. She came to Canada with her family in 1968. In 1980 she received a Bachelor of Music degree in Honours Composition from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where her primary composition teacher was Barrie Cabena. She also studied piano with Erhard Schlenker, French horn with Felix Acevedo, and organ with Nixon McMillan and Jan Overduin. She is an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, in piano performance. In 1987 she received a Master of Music degree in composition from the University of Sydney, Australia, where she studied with Peter Sculthorpe.
Jana's compositions cover a wide spectrum of instrumental and vocal resources. Her music has an expressive lyricism, and integrates a variety of influences from Gregorian chant to Czech folksong. Her compositions have been performed in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
The Lehner String Quartet of Washington DC previously performed her Australian Images in 2021. The piece, composed in homage to her former composition teacher Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, evokes Jana’s responses to several iconic landmarks of the Australian landscape.
Mezzo-soprano Maria Soulis premiered Jana’s composition Presences in Toronto in 2022 and New Year Carol in 2024. In 2020 soprano Clarisse Tonigussi premiered the monodrama The Path before Me (with text and music by Jana Skarecky) in Waterloo and online. In celebration of Jana’s 60th birthday in 2017 a concert of her compositions and an exhibition of her art took place in Toronto – Time Tributaries, Music and Art by Jana Skarecky. The premiere of The Land Sings for two bass clarinets, percussion & organ, commissioned by NUMUS, premiered in 2017 in Waterloo, Ontario. Her orchestral work Streams opened Hammerson Hall of the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, Ontario.
She loves writing for the voice, both solo and choral works, and setting poetry to music — for example, Green and Gold for soprano and piano (settings of poetry by P.K. Page, toured across Canada in 2017 by Clarisse Tonigussi), commissioned for the Wider Boundaries of Daring poetry conference (Windsor), and the choral work Song of Life, commissioned for Then, Now, & Beyond… a Festival of Music by Women (Ottawa). Jana's choral setting of the poem Back to Babylon by Viggo Mortensen was premiered in New Zealand in 2012. Her one-woman opera Emily, the Way You Are was well received by audiences. Some of her choral music is published by Alliance Publications (Wisconsin) and available from Hal Leonard.
Jana Skarecky is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. She has been Chair of the Association of Canadian Women Composers, and has served on the National Council of the Canadian League of Composers.
Jana is also active as a visual artist primarily painting with acrylics, and as a photographer. She often composes and paints in parallel, finding that the two media interact and lead in new directions. She teaches piano and music theory and examines for the Royal Conservatory of Music. She has sung with the Contemporary Singers in Sydney (Australia) and the St. Mary Magdalene’s Gallery Choir in Toronto. She is the translator of The Foundations of Modern Harmony by Karel Janeček from Czech into English (WLU Press 2024).
Many of Jana's compositions are available from the Canadian Music Centre.
Further see www.JanaSkarecky.com, and www.YouTube.com Jana Skarecky.
Australian Images - string quartet by Jana Skarecky
Jana Skarecky’s string quartet Australian Images is in memory of Peter Sculthorpe, her teacher and friend. It is inspired by the majestic and mysterious Australian land, where she lived for a year and later visited again. The four movements evoke Jana’s own experiences of four special places. These land formations are culturally and spiritually important to the Australian Aboriginal people who have been their caretakers for millennia, and who have their own traditions associated with them.
The piece begins in the desert of central Australia – a place of dry heat, red earth, and rock… The first movement is Kata Tjuta – which means “many heads” – a group of 36 red dome-shaped mountains, formed hundreds of millions of years ago, sacred to the Anangu people. Walking along the hiking trail of the Walpa Gorge, one of the areas where visitors are allowed, the giant red domes tower on either side of you, and you are asked to “Walk quietly, tread lightly… hold in your heart the knowledge that this is a special place.”
The second movement is Uluru - the great red sandstone monolith, 348 meters high, over 9 km around, also sacred to the Anangu… the rock marked with fissures, ravines, caves, even ancient paintings. It glowed red at sunrise, but there was lightning in the dark sky above it in the evening – a thunderstorm being a very rare event in the desert – the next day the water holes had water levels two meters higher than normal, and the frog chorus was going crazy…
The third movement is Ubirr, a rock formation in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. It includes a group of rock outcrops on the edge of the Nadab floodplain with natural shelters containing Aboriginal rock paintings thousands of years old. The art depicts creation ancestors as well as animals from the area. This movement opens with a quotation from one of the Choralemovements of Peter Sculthorpe’s 10th String Quartet, and contains material from the piano Elegy which Jana composed when he passed away in 2014.
The fourth movement is Karrimurra Waterfall (also known as Florence Falls) – this is in Litchfield Park near Darwin, in the Northern Territory. The segmented double waterfall cascades about thirty meters down a cliff into a clear, cool, shady plunge-pool, surrounded by lush monsoon forest. The traditional caretakers of the area, the Wangait people, say that “because of the rapids and currents it doesn’t matter how close you are to others, you won’t hear them… it’s a place exclusive to the individual… a spiritual place… which brings peace of mind... it feeds your mind and soul.”
