Photo: Erika Valentina Doria
Composer Mark Abel has been based in California for the past three decades and is known primarily for his collaborations with Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann. A rock musician as a young man, Abel began developing his classical compositional style during a 20+-year career as a newspaper editor in San Francisco. His music began to circulate more widely after he became affiliated in 2012 with the Delos label, which has released five Abel albums including The Cave of Wondrous Voice – the composer’s first foray into instrumental chamber music.
Abel’s idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing. Possessing a strong gift for melody, he has concentrated mainly on vocal music, whose contours extend from art song to larger forms involving the orchestra to a 103-minute chamber opera. Abel’s style follows a consistent path in its attempts to directly engage listeners and be taken at face value while leaving something deeper to ponder later. His seamless incorporation of rock and jazz elements into classical structures has been praised as one of the very few successful experiments along those lines.
Abel has set poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda and California poets Kate Gale and Joanne Regenhardt. He is also a lyricist of considerable emotional power in his own right, shining a light on timeless issues and those of today, couched at times in biting social commentary. Among the subjects he has addressed in his own lyrics are the phenomenon of contemporary terrorism, the psyches and social milieus of his fellow Californians and Americans as a society, the peaks and chasms of personal relationships.
The composer’s recent move into chamber music has led to recorded performances by such venerated players as David Shifrin, Fred Sherry, Carol Rosenberger and Robert Koenig, and rising talents cellist Jonah Kim, violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and pianist Dominic Cheli.
Abel's fourth release on Delos, Time and Distance, is a wide-ranging survey that features Hila Plitmann and Southern California mezzo Janelle DeStefano. It was preceded by the double CD package Home Is a Harbor – which includes Abel’s first opera (a three-act look at modern America through the experiences of twentysomething twin sisters) and the Gale-derived cycle “The Palm Trees Are Restless” – the art song showcase Terrain of the Heart and the orchestral song cycle The Dream Gallery.
Abel’s life suggests a creative tapestry woven with two primary and powerful strands: Music and journalism. Son of the distinguished reporter and author Elie Abel, Mark Abel grew up in America, Europe and Asia, receiving crucial exposure as a child to the fast-moving global political and cultural events of the 1950s and 1960s. The immersion included an introduction to classical music, which was his consuming artistic interest until his early teens. It was then supplanted for some time by modern jazz and later by rock, the medium through which he first developed his talents as a writer of vocal music. Mark briefly attended Stanford University in the turbulent late '60s but decided to strike out on his own at the age of 20.
As a guitarist, bassist, songwriter and record producer in New York in the 1970s and into the '80s, Abel led his own groups and collaborated with such seminal rock figures as Tom Verlaine (Television), the Feelies, Danny Kalb (the Blues Project), Michael Brown (the Left Banke), and Harold Kelling, founder of the legendary Atlanta fusion group the Hampton Grease Band. He participated as a choral singer in the 1971 recording of jazz composer Carla Bley's groundbreaking masterpiece Escalator Over the Hill.
Abel relocated to California in 1983 and made a vocational shift into journalism, eventually becoming the foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle (the second largest newspaper on the West Coast), a post he held until 2004. During those years, much changed in his musical world as he began working out more complex compositional ideas, an evolving process that led him back to classical music.
Influenced by a variety of artists from different genres, Abel’s principal heroes include composers such as Ives, Szymanowski, Brahms, Duparc, Strauss, Debussy, Berg, Janacek, Lutoslawski, Takemitsu and Dutilleux. He also continues to draw inspiration from jazz figures from his early years, among them: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Paul Bley and Denny Zeitlin. He has never sought to eradicate the lingering (if sublimated) influence of rock in his work, preferring to continue refining and expanding his signature synthesis of musical building blocks.
Abel's music has been given at venues including SongFest in Los Angeles and the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, Or. He currently resides in Sonoma, Ca.
MARK ABEL EPK MATERIALS:
The Cave of Wondrous Voice press release
Headshot 1
Headshot 2
Headshot 3
photos by Corina Gamma
Abel’s idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing. Possessing a strong gift for melody, he has concentrated mainly on vocal music, whose contours extend from art song to larger forms involving the orchestra to a 103-minute chamber opera. Abel’s style follows a consistent path in its attempts to directly engage listeners and be taken at face value while leaving something deeper to ponder later. His seamless incorporation of rock and jazz elements into classical structures has been praised as one of the very few successful experiments along those lines.
Abel has set poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda and California poets Kate Gale and Joanne Regenhardt. He is also a lyricist of considerable emotional power in his own right, shining a light on timeless issues and those of today, couched at times in biting social commentary. Among the subjects he has addressed in his own lyrics are the phenomenon of contemporary terrorism, the psyches and social milieus of his fellow Californians and Americans as a society, the peaks and chasms of personal relationships.
The composer’s recent move into chamber music has led to recorded performances by such venerated players as David Shifrin, Fred Sherry, Carol Rosenberger and Robert Koenig, and rising talents cellist Jonah Kim, violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and pianist Dominic Cheli.
Abel's fourth release on Delos, Time and Distance, is a wide-ranging survey that features Hila Plitmann and Southern California mezzo Janelle DeStefano. It was preceded by the double CD package Home Is a Harbor – which includes Abel’s first opera (a three-act look at modern America through the experiences of twentysomething twin sisters) and the Gale-derived cycle “The Palm Trees Are Restless” – the art song showcase Terrain of the Heart and the orchestral song cycle The Dream Gallery.
Abel’s life suggests a creative tapestry woven with two primary and powerful strands: Music and journalism. Son of the distinguished reporter and author Elie Abel, Mark Abel grew up in America, Europe and Asia, receiving crucial exposure as a child to the fast-moving global political and cultural events of the 1950s and 1960s. The immersion included an introduction to classical music, which was his consuming artistic interest until his early teens. It was then supplanted for some time by modern jazz and later by rock, the medium through which he first developed his talents as a writer of vocal music. Mark briefly attended Stanford University in the turbulent late '60s but decided to strike out on his own at the age of 20.
As a guitarist, bassist, songwriter and record producer in New York in the 1970s and into the '80s, Abel led his own groups and collaborated with such seminal rock figures as Tom Verlaine (Television), the Feelies, Danny Kalb (the Blues Project), Michael Brown (the Left Banke), and Harold Kelling, founder of the legendary Atlanta fusion group the Hampton Grease Band. He participated as a choral singer in the 1971 recording of jazz composer Carla Bley's groundbreaking masterpiece Escalator Over the Hill.
Abel relocated to California in 1983 and made a vocational shift into journalism, eventually becoming the foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle (the second largest newspaper on the West Coast), a post he held until 2004. During those years, much changed in his musical world as he began working out more complex compositional ideas, an evolving process that led him back to classical music.
Influenced by a variety of artists from different genres, Abel’s principal heroes include composers such as Ives, Szymanowski, Brahms, Duparc, Strauss, Debussy, Berg, Janacek, Lutoslawski, Takemitsu and Dutilleux. He also continues to draw inspiration from jazz figures from his early years, among them: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Paul Bley and Denny Zeitlin. He has never sought to eradicate the lingering (if sublimated) influence of rock in his work, preferring to continue refining and expanding his signature synthesis of musical building blocks.
Abel's music has been given at venues including SongFest in Los Angeles and the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, Or. He currently resides in Sonoma, Ca.
MARK ABEL EPK MATERIALS:
The Cave of Wondrous Voice press release
Headshot 1
Headshot 2
Headshot 3
photos by Corina Gamma