Recently Departed - Dr. Ron Mazurek
Dr. Ron Mazurek
Teacher and Friend
I had the great blessing to know Dr. Ron Mazurek from September of 1986 to his passing on to eternity with God. For all those years, he was a constant source of comfort to me by his willingness to care about my future. I always knew that whenever I could not figure something out that Dr. Mazurek would give of himself in some way to help me in my crisis. He was literally a phone call away, and thus he will be missed by me for as long as I live.
His strength as a composition teacher was remarkable and truly unique. Dr. Mazurek was able to penetrate beyond the syntactic world of music to its deeper levels where the essence of music lives. And because of this deep understand of music as language, Dr. Mazurek helped me and many others to cross over the bridge of the syntactic world into the world of music as metaphor.
Dr. Mazurek knew that the times that he lived in required a revolutionary approach for the contemporary composer. He was a self-promoter, a performer, a teacher, a composer, a producer, and he employed all the roles that are necessary today to further the career and the music of a composer. Therefore, he was a model for all composers of the new generation.
As an anecdote, I once asked him why music was important. His answer shows that he knew for a long time its role in our lives. To paraphrase his answer, he said, “Would the world be better without new music?”
Hopefully, one of our ambitions in this world will be to leave it a better place. Dr. Ron Mazurek made that possible by the fruits of his love for his family, his friends, and his students.
Helmut Christoferus Calabrese, Ph. D.
2007
