Mark So is a Los Angeles-based composer and musician, enjoying life under rent control with a "bad" car and no cell phone. Originally from Syracuse, he graduated Pomona College and received his master's degree in composition from CalArts. His teachers have included Michael Pisaro, Thomas Flaherty, Annetta Kaplan, James Tenney, Sara Roberts, Christian Wolff and Stephen "Lucky" Mosko. In the last 5 years, he has written over 500 pieces, including the extensive Ashbery series, readings and empires, pursuing the unforeseen in subtly reduced scenarios of musical choice and action, while exploring the space and setting of music in new ways. Mostly text-based and strongly influenced by the New York School, Fluxus and the Wandelweiser composers group, his work explores varied open "theaters" of the sensible by scoring experimental engagements with faint, passing subtleties of continuity and arrangement (time and harmony) that often demand extreme attention, in and around changing experiences of silence.
Major performances of his music have taken place around the world, at such venues and events as the Maybeck Studio for Performing Arts (Berkeley), MicroFest 2008 at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), REDCAT (Los Angeles), UC Santa Barbara (site of the 2007 retrospective mark so: late early works), Cold Storage Project (Los Angeles), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), the artSpa series at HEC-LA and Sea & Space galleries (Los Angeles), the Cazenovia Counterpoint Festival (Cazenovia, NY), CiNE Space (New York), LISTEN/SPACE (New York), the Chop Shop (Berlin), the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival (New York), Kunstraum Düsseldorf (Germany), il corral (Los Angeles), {open} bookstore (Long Beach, CA), SITUATIONS|Life.Art.Transitions.Interpretations. [Maulwerker performs music 2008] at Villa Elisabeth (Berlin), DRIP EVENT for George Brecht at the Crisp London gallery (Los Angeles), The MicroScore Project at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), Dortmund University (Germany), the San Fernando Road Concert (Los Angeles), the series You Too Can Play Difficult Music at Machine Project (Los Angeles), ROOTS/ROUTES: Performing the City at ICMC 2008 (Belfast), Galerie Mark Müller (Zürich), the wulf. (Los Angeles) and CalArts (Valencia, CA), among many other performances at venues, residencies, schools and festivals, and his 'blind documents' series is featured on the experimental music webstream Radio Wandelweiser. His music has been played by notable ensembles including Maulwerker, object collection, the New Music Collective of Charleston, duo gagliardi barrett, the California EAR Unit, incidental music, and the Dog Star Orchestra, and he has had new works commissioned by Microscore Project, the duo Guthrie & Streb, and the Maybeck Studio for Performing Arts, among others.
In addition to composing, So is active as a performer, mainly as a pianist, having been involved in many notable performances in the U.S. and Germany. He has played, and in many cases premiered, works by such composers as G. Douglas Barrett, Antoine Beuger, George Brecht, Jason Brogan, Gavin Bryars, John Cage, Johnny Chang, Morton Feldman, Adam Fong, Jürg Frey, August Friscia, Kerstin Fuchs, Eva-Maria Houben, Terry Jennings, Travis Just, Lewis Keller, Christian Kesten, Joseph Kudirka, Cat Lamb, Radu Malfatti, Andre O. Möller, James Orsher, Adam Overton, Michael Pisaro, James Saunders, Kunsu Shim, Yuji Takahashi, Luke Thomas Taylor, James Tenney, Jason Thomas, Tashi Wada, Manfred Werder, Michael Winter, Christian Wolff, Harris Wulfson, Istvàn Zelenka, and others. He has also performed with several ensembles, including the CalArts Experimental Music Workshop, the Dogstar Orchestra, the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, STEVEN, and Grundlagen der Matematik; organized numerous experimental music events in the Los Angeles area at such venues as Cold Storage Project, Dangerous Curve, and Machine Project; and co-founded the Wednesday Hour, FESTIVAL : , and Studio Apartments experimental music series. He co-produced (with the late Stephen "Lucky" Mosko) the California EAR Unit's new recording of Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff (Bridge Records), and he appears on two recent CDs of music by Michael Pisaro (harmony series 11-16 and an unrhymed chord), both available on Edition Wandelweiser Records.
He has been awarded residency fellowships by the Montana Artists Refuge (Basin, MT), the KHN Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (Taos, NM), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), the Ucross Foundation (WY) and Spiro Arts (Park City, UT). He co-edited (with James Orsher and Sara Roberts) Everyone Loves Difficult Music, the companion book to the 2006 experimental music series at Machine Project in Los Angeles. His essay "nearing/hearing" appears in the Fall 2008 issue of The Open Space, and his article "Into Silence: The Poetics of Hearing in Experimental Music since Cage" is forthcoming. BANGS, his book on Manfred Werder's ongoing performance of So's piece of the same name, is now in print.