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*  Educator
*  Performer
*  Journalist
*  Composer

Music has always been the passion and life of Jerry Ozipko, a native Edmontonian, who began his musical career with violin lessons from the age of seven. His two inspirations were his father, an amateur violinist, and his aunt, the librarian and a violinist/violist and trombonist with the Edmonton Philharmonic and Edmonton Symphony Orchestras during the 1940s and 1950s. He was involved in community and ethnic music making from the very start, playing in various Ukrainian dance bands and in the Edmonton Junior Symphony Orchestra in the years before it became the Edmonton Youth Orchestra. His first major teacher of influence was the late Ranald Shean, who was a pillar of violin instruction for many decades. Jerry matured as an artist and following graduation from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance, where he studied with Thomas Rolston and the Hungarian String Quartet, he went on to continue studies at NE Missouri State University (William E. FitzSimmons), Yale University (the Yale String Quartet) and the Music Academy of the West, where he studied with Berl Senofsky. He also studied composition variously with Violet Archer (UofA), Frederick Kirchberger (NEMO State) and Joan Panetti (Yale). Before choosing the career direction of music educator, he served as an orchestral musician in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for several years and later on became a vocal advocate and performer of new music in Alberta. He is one of the founding members of the ECCS. In 1972, he founded the SYNAPSE: New Music Ensemble, which presented works by many Canadian, American and European avante-garde and experimental composers in Edmonton and Calgary during the 1970s and early 1980s. Soon afterward, he was invited to participate in the Reinhard von Berg/Bill Damur’s project, Otherwise.

Jerry’s journalistic career began back in high school, where he served as the Features Editor of his high school newspaper The Vic Argosy during his senior year. During that same time he was also the photography editor of the high school yearbook. Over the following years, while a university student, then a graduate student and eventually a professional musician and public school music educator, and most recently as a private instructor of violin, he continued to provide articles of both an academic nature and of the more popular variety to many publications.

Since his return to Edmonton in 1996 after several years as an educator in British Columbia he has built up a studio of 47 students, aged from five to retirement, at Sherwood Park School of Music, where he has also been Director of Curriculum Development for new programmes since July, 2001. He free-lances as a music writer in his free time, and has recently re-entered the performance medium.
 

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