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In Memoriam
Dr. Ante L. Padjen
Founder and Director, I Medici di McGill Orchestra
Professor Emeritus of Pharmacology, McGill University
(1942.02.04 – 2025.11.03)
Tom Samek, Deputy Director of I Medici di McGill and good friend of Dr. Padjen:
True to his favourite way of describing others, “illustrious” perfectly captures his own generous and devoted spirit. Through all the ups and downs, Ante’s heart was always focused on keeping our musical family together and in harmony.
He cared deeply — not only for the orchestra, but for each of us personally. His warmth, humour, and belief in the healing power of music will remain with us always.
May his memory be a blessing to his family, to the members of his orchestra, and to the Faculty of Medicine. He is dearly missed.
Dr. Ante L. Padjen was a man whose life embodied both science and art, a neuropharmacologist by profession and a musician by passion. As founder of the I Medici di McGill Orchestra, he brought together hundreds of physicians, scientists, and students who shared his belief that music, like medicine, has the power to heal.
Born and raised in Croatia, Ante’s first education was in music. His father, an amateur violinist, enrolled him in music school at an early age, where he studied theory with the forward-thinking pedagogue Professor Elly Bašić. Her conviction that “music is an innate human ability” shaped Ante’s lifelong belief in the universality of musical expression. He later studied viola under Professor Miroslav Miletić, a composer who deepened his understanding of both the instrument and the art form.
At fourteen, Ante’s life took an unexpected turn. Stricken with tuberculosis, he spent nearly two years in a sanatorium, 600 days that transformed his future. His roommate there was a physician who inspired in him a deep fascination with medicine. When Ante recovered, he set aside his musical career to study medicine, yet he never abandoned his viola. Even as a medical student, he founded the Jeunesses Musicales Orchestra in Zagreb, combining his two callings before eventually choosing medical research as his professional path.
Ante’s medical journey took him from Zagreb to Edinburgh, Washington, and Texas, before he settled in Montreal, a city he came to love for its cultural richness and human warmth. Joining McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, he became a respected professor of pharmacology and an admired mentor. In Montreal he found the ideal setting to raise a family and to realize his vision of uniting medicine and music.
That vision became reality in 1989 when he founded the I Medici di McGill Orchestra with the support of then Dean of Medicine, Dr. Richard Cruess. What began as a small string chamber ensemble of about fifteen medically connected musicians quickly expanded into a full symphony orchestra under the baton of conductor Wanda Kaluzny. Over time, I Medici grew to include doctors, medical students, and other professionals, lawyers, engineers, physicists, and biochemists, all drawn to Ante’s infectious enthusiasm and belief in music’s healing power.
Through more than three decades, I Medici di McGill has performed benefit concerts for dozens of medical and humanitarian causes, from cancer and blindness foundations to refugee relief and support for Ukraine. Under Ante’s guidance, the orchestra became both a musical institution and a community, the only doctors’ orchestra in Canada, and a rare model of interdisciplinary harmony.
In his famously cluttered McGill office, where scientific papers competed for space with a harpsichord and a double bass, Ante would recount the orchestra’s history with pride and humor. “Even those who aren’t doctors,” he once joked, “have surely visited one recently. That way we maintain the medical link.”
Ante’s colleagues and musicians remember him not only for his intellect and organizational energy, but also for his warmth, wit, and generosity. He inspired generations of students to see medicine as an art and musicians to see music as a form of care.
Over thirty-seven years, more than five hundred musicians have played under the I Medici banner, and countless patients and audiences have benefited from the orchestra’s message of compassion through sound.
Dr. Ante Padjen leaves behind a living legacy, a thriving orchestra that continues to unite hearts and minds through music. His belief endures in every note played: that healing, in its truest sense, is both scientific and human, both rigorous and deeply kind.
This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en:
Français (French)
