Mark Barden

Mark Barden is an American composer. His music understands sound as a fundamentally physical phenomenon. By emphasizing the violence of sound-making – with all its gripping, striking, and scraping – he invites the audience not just to listen, but to feel their own bodies listening and engaging with sound and, vicariously, with the musicians’ bodies as their muscles and breath vibrate the air. Recent works marry virtuosic execution with noise-based sonic material, striving for an inward-turned complexity that, like microscopic views of cells or atoms, is both life-affirming and dizzying in detail.

Barden composes concert music and sound installations with and without live performers. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and Goldsmiths and studied composition with Lewis Nielson, Rebecca Saunders, Mathias Spahlinger, Jörg Widmann and Roger Redgate. His work has received honors and distinctions from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, GEMA, Darmstadt Summer Courses, Berlin Academy of Arts, Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, among others. Works commissioned by leading cultural institutions and festivals (Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Wien Modern, Goethe Institut, among others) are performed regularly by Klangforum Wien, Ensemble intercontemporain, ensemble recherche, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble KNM Berlin, ensemble mosaik, Nicolas Hodges, Arditti Quartet, and others. Mark Barden is a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. His scores are published by Edition Peters.