Jan Kaczmarek
Polish composer Jan Andrzej Paweł Kaczmarek was born in Konin, central Poland on 29 April 1953. He studied music from quite young, but he studied law.
He wrote music for more than seventy feature films and documentaries, spending some of his life in Los Angeles, but was also commissioned to write two important works - Cantata for Freedom (2005) to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and Oratorio 1956 (2006) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Poznań uprising. First performances of both choral/orchestral works were broadcast live on Polish national TV.
He set up the Rozbitek Institute, which opened in 2005, to help develop new work in film, music, new media and theatre. He was also founder and director of the Transatlantyk Festival, held annually in Łódź.
Jan Kaczmarek died from multiple system atrophy in Kraków on 21 May 2024, aged seventy-one.