About Mark Barden

Mark Barden’s 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 (b. 1980, Cleveland, USA) 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 the Arts, Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, et alia.
Works commissioned by leading cultural institutions and festivals (e. g., Donaueschingen, Witten, Wien Modern, Goethe Institut) are performed regularly by Klangforum Wien, Ensemble intercontemporain, ensemble recherche, the Mivos Quartet, KNM Berlin, ensemble mosaik, Nicolas Hodges, the Arditti Quartet, and others. Mark Barden is a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. His scores are published by Edition Peters.
www.mark-barden.com