Hyperion Records

Mark Edgley Smith was born on 20th March 1955 in Wimbledon, in the suburbs of London. He was educated at Tiffin School, Kingston-on-Thames, where he began to compose seriously, and went on to study music at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, though as a composer he remained mostly self-taught.

His style could be diatonically tuneful, as in the Vancouver songbook, a project of part-songs for the Vancouver Bach Children’s Chorus. At other times it was highly complex and chromatic (The house of Sleep). Sometimes these extremes can be found in a single work, as in the five madrigals to poems by e e cummings (1994), which won a competition for new choral music and were later released on CD. In 2001 his setting of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival of Music, was premièred by members of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Other works have been performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (Songs my Auntie taught me), the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble. (Fanfares for forgotten occasions), the Tippett Quartet (String quartet) and the composer-pianist Robert Keeley (People of liberated city …).

Mark died after a long illness on 26th July 2008.