Mark Abel is an American composer born in 1948 and based in Northern California. He is known for his distinctive vocal and chamber works and his multiple collaborations with Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann. A rock musician as a young man, Abel began developing his signature style during a 20+-year career as a newspaper editor in San Francisco. His music began to circulate after he became affiliated in 2012 with the Delos label, which has released six Abel albums. The most recent is Spectrum – the broadest survey to date of his palette of expression.
Abel’s idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing. Possessing a strong gift for melody, he first made his mark with vocal music, its contours extending from art song to larger forms involving the orchestra to a 103-minute opera. An expansion into chamber music beginning in 2018 has led to recorded performances by revered figures such as David Shifrin, Fred Sherry, Carol Rosenberger, Isabel Bayrakdarian and Robert Koenig, and rising talents cellist Jonah Kim, mezzo Kindra Scharich, violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and pianist Dominic Cheli. Abel’s 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 depth in his own right, praised for shining a light on timeless and contemporary issues.
Abel's 2020 Delos release, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, introduced his first chamber works. Time and Distance (2018) features Hila Plitmann and mezzo Janelle DeStefano. Home Is a Harbor (2016) includes Abel’s first opera (a look at modern America through the lens of twentysomething twin sisters) and the Gale-derived, Los Angeles-centric cycle “The Palm Trees Are Restless,” sung by Plitmann. His first two Delos albums are the art song showcase Terrain of the Heart (2014) and the large-scale orchestral song cycle The Dream Gallery (2012).
Abel’s creative life suggests a tapestry woven with two primary and powerful strands: Music and journalism. Son of the distinguished reporter and author Elie Abel, Mark grew up in America, Europe and Asia, receiving as a child crucial exposure to the fast-moving global political and cultural events of the 1950s and 1960s. This 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, Michael Brown (the Left Banke), Danny Kalb (the Blues Project) and Harold Kelling, founder of the legendary Atlanta fusion group the Hampton Grease Band. In 1971 Mark participated as a choral singer in the 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.
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. Mark views his mission going forward as refining and expanding his signature synthesis of musical building blocks.
Abel's music has been given at venues including SongFest in Los Angeles, Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Or., the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo, the Irvine Barclay Theater, Boston Court in Pasadena, and the Olmos Ensemble in San Antonio. He currently resides in Sonoma, Ca.
MARK ABEL EPK MATERIALS:
Spectrum press release
Interview, Oct. 2022
Headshot 1
Headshot 2
Headshot 3
Headshot 4
Abel’s idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing. Possessing a strong gift for melody, he first made his mark with vocal music, its contours extending from art song to larger forms involving the orchestra to a 103-minute opera. An expansion into chamber music beginning in 2018 has led to recorded performances by revered figures such as David Shifrin, Fred Sherry, Carol Rosenberger, Isabel Bayrakdarian and Robert Koenig, and rising talents cellist Jonah Kim, mezzo Kindra Scharich, violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and pianist Dominic Cheli. Abel’s 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 depth in his own right, praised for shining a light on timeless and contemporary issues.
Abel's 2020 Delos release, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, introduced his first chamber works. Time and Distance (2018) features Hila Plitmann and mezzo Janelle DeStefano. Home Is a Harbor (2016) includes Abel’s first opera (a look at modern America through the lens of twentysomething twin sisters) and the Gale-derived, Los Angeles-centric cycle “The Palm Trees Are Restless,” sung by Plitmann. His first two Delos albums are the art song showcase Terrain of the Heart (2014) and the large-scale orchestral song cycle The Dream Gallery (2012).
Abel’s creative life suggests a tapestry woven with two primary and powerful strands: Music and journalism. Son of the distinguished reporter and author Elie Abel, Mark grew up in America, Europe and Asia, receiving as a child crucial exposure to the fast-moving global political and cultural events of the 1950s and 1960s. This 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, Michael Brown (the Left Banke), Danny Kalb (the Blues Project) and Harold Kelling, founder of the legendary Atlanta fusion group the Hampton Grease Band. In 1971 Mark participated as a choral singer in the 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.
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. Mark views his mission going forward as refining and expanding his signature synthesis of musical building blocks.
Abel's music has been given at venues including SongFest in Los Angeles, Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Or., the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo, the Irvine Barclay Theater, Boston Court in Pasadena, and the Olmos Ensemble in San Antonio. He currently resides in Sonoma, Ca.
MARK ABEL EPK MATERIALS:
Spectrum press release
Interview, Oct. 2022
Headshot 1
Headshot 2
Headshot 3
Headshot 4
