Mark Edgley Smith

Who was Mark Edgley Smith?

Mark Edgley Smith was a British composer.

He was born in Wimbledon, and educated at Tiffin School, Kingston-upon-Thames, where he began to compose seriously. He went on to study music at The Queen's College, University of Oxford, though as a composer he remained mostly self-taught.

His style could be diatonically tuneful, as in the Vancouver songbook, a project of part-songs for the Vancouver Bach Children’s Chorus. At other times it was highly complex and chromatic. Sometimes these extremes can be found in a single work, as in the five madrigals to poems by e e cummings, which won a competition for new choral music and were later released on CD. In 2001 his setting of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival of Music, was premièred by members of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Other works have been performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble., the Tippett Quartet and the composer-pianist Robert Keeley.

He had a daughter, Anna February Edgley-Smith and a son, Milo Henry Edgley-Smith.