About
Mark Dancigers is a composer of chamber, orchestral, film, and solo instrumental works, and the electric guitarist for the new-chamber music group NOW Ensemble. Praised for his "entrancing" music in the New York Times, Dancigers creates scores that are melodically driven, texturally imaginative, and sonically vibrant.
Dancigers studied composition at Yale (B.A.), the Yale School of Music (M.M.), and Princeton University (PhD). His principal teachers have been Steven Mackey, Martin Bresnick, Paul Lansky, Ezra Laderman, John Halle, Kathryn Alexander, and Matthew Suttor. He has previously been on the faculties of Yale College and the University of Redlands School of Music, and is currently Assistant Professor at the New College of Florida in Sarasota.
His orchestra music has been performed by the Alabama, Minnesota, Cabrillo, and New York Youth Symphony Orchestras. A large part of his chamber music output is for NOW Ensemble, whose second album "Awake" charted at #2 on Amazon's Classical Music Charts and was featured on NPR's All Things Considered. His piece for yMusic "Everness" has been broadcast repeatedly on the nationally aired program "Performance Today."
Dancigers solo piano work "The Bright Motion" was used by choreographer Justin Peck for a pas de deux commissioned by the Fall for Dance for their 10th Anniversary Season. He has also collaborated with choreographer Troy Schumacher and his group Ballet Collective on a pas de deux, "The Last Time This Ended", which was praised in the Huffington Post as "creeping, majestic, and fantastical; it feels textured, like if you could touch the music, it would prick you."
He worked with Oscar nominated director Sam Green on the film "The Measure of All Things", premiered at the Sundance Festival with live soundtrack performed by yMusic. The film score has been performed subsequently in the Netherlands, Greece, the U.K., and venues around the United States.
His work with Sarasota Contemporary Dance choreographer Leymis Bolaños Wilmott, "Jehanne", is based on the life of Joan of Arc and was praised in the Sarasota Herald Tribune: "The music was played live on stage by Mark Dancigers alone, his electric guitar connected to a digital recorder that allowed him, in the moment, to repeat recorded phrases and add others in layers, creating a compelling, contemporary sound."
Other performances have included the Apples and Olives Festival in Zurich, the Nordernzon Performing Arts Festival in the Netherlands, The Athens Concert Hall, Greece, Sydney, Australia, Carnegie Hall, Miller Theater, Symphony Space, Merkin Hall, BargeMusic, the Kitchen NYC, Arts Brookfield at the Brookfield Place Winter Garden, the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, the Skaneateles Festival, Cal Arts, the Strathmore Mansion, Music Mondays, the Festival International Chihuahua, Mexico, the Music Gallery, Toronto, Montclaire State's Peak Performances, Pittsburgh's Music on the Edge, Southern Exposure, New Music New College, Western Michigan University, the Carlsbad Festival, the Look and Listen Festival, and numerous other venues.
As an album producer, his credits include pianist Michael Mizrahi's "Currents" (2016) and "The Bright Motion" (2012), which made the Top Ten Best Classical Releases of 2012 in both Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago. Critics wrote that Dancigers' piece "The Bright Motion" contained the album's "loveliest moments...Stately trills repeat operatically throughout, creating wave-like effects whose lulling motions impart a dream-like, incantatory feeling to the material—bright motion, indeed" (Textura).