New York City based composer, pianist and video artist Brian Mark has been hailed as an "attractive and intelligible" artist (Boston Musical Intelligencer), whose work is "compelling" (London Jazz News), and "preserves the vibrancy and relevance of contemporary art music" (New York Examiner). The American Composers Forum esteemed Brian as an "intelligent, modern composer who employs many media elements and does so with marked idiosyncrasy and depth”, and his concert programming has recently been described as “a fluid approach to presenting new music in fresh contexts and juxtapositions” (The New Yorker).

Brian’s music have been performed by many notable ensembles, such as the BBC Singers, Psappha Ensemble, Chelsea Symphony, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Signal, Atlas Ensemble, MikroEnsemble, Brave New Works, Choral Chameleon, both the Ligeti and Esterhazy String Quartets, Juventas Ensemble, Dither Quartet, members of the London Symphony Orchestra, among many others. His works have been presented around the world in festivals such as Bang on a Can, Oregon Bach Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, Atlas Festival, Spitalfields Music Festival, i=u, June in Buffalo, Tutti Festival, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the highSCORE Festival.

As a visual artist since 2017, Brian’s video installations works have been shown in venues and art galleries in France, UK and the US, such as LSO St. Luke’s, The Holy Art Gallery, Arts & Sciences Days in Saint-Etienne, France, Iklectic Art Lab in Southeast London, Gallery Arte Azulejo, Areté Venue and Art Gallery, IncuArts Gallery, Mozaik Philanthropy Online Exhibition, Artist Talk Magazine (UK), the Nomadic Contemporary Gallery, Eric Fischl Gallery in Phoenix, AZ, Lilypad in Cambridge, MA, and Spectrum NYC.

Brian has received multiple awards and grants from the American Prize, New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Jerome Composers Commissioning Program/Jerome Fund, New Music USA, the Grammy Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ASCAP and SCI, New London Singers, Ross McKee Foundation, Florence Gould Michael Iovenko Memorial Fellowship, the BMI Henry Warren Film Scoring Award, and was very highly commended for the 2016 Alan Bush Prize.  He has been featured as a composer-in-residence with the Chelsea Symphony, the Bizarre Noir Theatre Company, and was awarded multiple artist residencies at the I-Park Artists’ Enclave, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.  He has received an Honorable Mention from the 2015 American Prize in Orchestral Composition, and was awarded one of the top ten prizes from Mozaik’s Philanthropy’s “Future Art Awards” Competition for works created in response to COVID-19.  In 2019 Brian also received a fellowship to study Korean Music at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul.

As a composer for film, his music for the Independent Short Film Misunderstood, directed by Pablo Herrán de Viu, was exhibited at the 2009 Screen Loud Film Festival in New York City, and the 2010 Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás in Habana City, Cuba. His collaborative work Sublime Oasis, commissioned by the East London Dance Company, was showcased at the 2012 Spitalfields Hidden Gems Dance Festival.

From 2009-2011 Brian was the Co-Artistic Director and Founder for DETOUR, a composer collective and New Music Ensemble, which was featured as “one the top five new music events of 2011" from New York’s Classical WQXR. He has also collaborated with UK’s record label Nonclassical as a concert curator, featuring emerging composers and artists throughout London and abroad. In addition, he was appointed as an Associate Member for the London Symphony Orchestra’s Composer Soundhub Scheme from 2015-2017, which culminated of his first video installation performance comprising of members from the LSO.  His curated concert series Ensemble in Process made its debut at the Iklectik Creative Space in Southeast London on May 15, 2017.

Brian had completed his PhD at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Gary Carpenter.  He is also a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Berklee College of Music, and Boston University.  Additional studies had taken place at the Longy School of Music, European American Musical Alliance Summer Course in Paris, France, and Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany with Dr. Samuel Adler. He has received a graduate certificate in film scoring from the University of Southern California, and has also studied with Philip Cashian, Samuel Adler, David Conte, David Garner, Michel Merlet, James Russell Smith, and Howard Frazin.

His debut LP album, Eleven to One (11/21) was released by Off Latch Press on May 6, 2022.

Photo: Hunter Willis

Photo: Hunter Willis