SMISEK, ANITA (b. 1941)

Anita Smisek, OP (b. 1941, Lonsdale, Minnesota), soprano, organist, pianist and composer, demonstrates the power which music in the home can have on one’'s personal and professional development. Her mother, Rose Smisek, soprano, piano teacher, choir director/organist in Lonsdale, Minnesota, fostered music with love, by example and enjoyment, as she raised her four children, of which Anita was the oldest.

 

Anita's fondest memories are around the family piano, with Mom playing and she and her two sisters singing along as a trio. She was an avid piano student during grade school and high school, earning a Certificate Piano Recital at Bethlehem Academy in Faribault in 1959. Further study was done under Mary Davida Wood, CSJ, Mary Edward Blackwell, OP, and Milous Ferlik. She studied organ with Rosilla Gross, OP, Miriam Murphy and Robert Luther. Her vocal coaches have been Mary Margaret Leahy, Oksana Bryn and Axel Theimer.

 

A member of the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters since 1960, Anita continues to minister through music, fostering an awareness among others of Czechoslovak music and composers, as has become evident through her direction of 6 uniquely special Nova Praha Vánočni Koncerts. She served St. Wenceslaus Church in New Prague as Music Director-Organist from 1983-1991, in which time she was able to restore to the parish its own ethnic religious song. The hymnal, Give Glory, is a historical anthology of 77 best-known Czech hymns, now in good English texts for contemporary use by the wider public as a resource and supplement to any music program. All of these programs and research are an outgrowth of her initial music research conducted at the University of Minnesota for her M.A. under musicologist, Dr. Johannes Reidel.

 

Anita has actively worked with the local people to learn and record their ancestral heritage in song through recordings: Koledy —Czech Christmas Carols, Ryba-Czech Christmas Mass, and Give Glory, Earth and Heaven (Songs of Advent/Christmas, Lent/Easter and national devotional favorites.) She has researched and performed Czech music in the USA and Czech Republic for over twenty years.

 

In 1989, she co-founded Alliance Publications, Inc. with composer Joel Blahník to publish music for school, church and community ensembles and to promote the works of contemporary composers with a special interest in Czechoslovak music.

 

Since September 1992, she is a staff member of the Sinsinawa Mound Center (Sinsinawa, Wisconsin) where she coordinates Sinsinawa Studios and teaches private music lessons and administrates Alliance Publications, Inc. and engraves scores of new compositions for publication with computer notation.