Antonia Pacek is a contemporary composer living in Vienna, Austria. Her passion for music started at a very early age. “When I told my parents, at the age of six, that I had enrolled myself at the music school they were taken by surprise,” she recalls. Although her parents were modest working class people, her loving Mum immediately took a second job to be able to afford her daughter a piano. Antonia started composing when she turned 11 (you can hear her first composition, Tamed Courage on her album A Secret Vision).

A dark side of the story was that her teacher, although a wonderful pianist, was a bad pedagogue and abusive as well, that she finally decided to stop attending the school and deeply buried her passion for music.

It was many years later that her old passion began to resurface. She spent more and more time playing, her fingers happily finding their way. “Music slowly came back to me, and on one gray rainy day I was inspired to write Rain. In 2001, when I was 6 months pregnant with my daughter, I composed Expecting Nina. I kept hearing music more and more in my head.” From shy beginnings, more tunes kept on coming, like an eruption from a volcano that had been inactive for years. Antonia knew that she would never again separate herself from music. She recently finished her 39th composition.

Realizing that music is her life, Antonia received strong encouragement from her family, friends, students, and the founder and director, David Nevue, of US Whispering Radio. Since May 2009, her compositions Rain, Expecting Nina and Inspiration, have been broadcasted on www.solopianoradio.com radio station.

Recently she has been committing more energy and time to record her music. Her first album, A Secret Vision, is a selection of the first 11 songs she composed. For the recording in Vienna at C-Arts Classical Arts Waldegg and Hajek tonstudio she used the August Foerster grand concert piano. In this hectic world full of crisis it is soothing to listen to the serene melodies of her soft sound piano music.

She is presently working as a composer on several projects with a visual artist and a poet, Alison Wilson. Together, they recently produced a DVD, Expressions, Spirit in Nature—Alison’s photographic slideshow of the Lofoten Islands in Norway, accompanied by her poetry and Antonia’s music. To preview the DVD, please go to www.artforsoul.eu.

Antonia’s second album, In My Soul, produced in the summer 2009, is a collection of more classically sounding soft piano melodies that were inspired by joyous as well as sad moments during the last couple years.