Dr. Mark Marrington

About

Mark Marrington is currently a Senior Lecturer in Music Production at York St John University. He trained in composition and musicology at the University of Leeds (M.Mus., Ph.D.) and then taught at Leeds College of Music between 1998-2011 at undergraduate and Masters degree levels, on a variety of music-related modules across the Classical, Jazz, Popular Music and Music Production degrees offered by the college. More recently he was the Programme Manager for the BSc Music, Multimedia and Electronics at the University of Leeds, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (2011-15). He has also worked as an external examiner, previously for the University of Brighton (City College) and currently for the Universities of Hertfordshire and Chester.

Mark has had articles and chapters published by Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge, Future Technology Press, British Music, Soundboard, Classical Guitar, the Musical Times and the Journal on the Art of Record Production. His research is currently focused on the following areas: digital technologies in music creation and production – principally Digital Audio Workstations – and their role in shaping contemporary popular music in genres ranging from EDM to metal; theories underlying music production practice; songwriting pedagogy and its relationship to practice; ideologies in music pedagogy with particular reference to music technology; the contemporary classical guitar, its history and repertoire; British classical music in the 20^th century.

During the 1990s and early 2000s Mark was also involved in writing and publishing pedagogical material for the guitar. He co-authored Guitar from Scratch with Christopher Norton (Boosey and Hawkes, 1999) and also performed and arranged the music for the accompanying CD. In 2004 he acted as a consultant for Usborne on a new series of books, Guitar Tunes for Children, and in the same year Mel Bay published his book of classical guitar arrangements, Nineteen Gilbert and Sullivan Favorites.

Mark is also an electronic musician who combines found sound approaches with a pop sensibility. A recent high profile success in March 2012 was the track ‘Cars’, a dance track built entirely from car sounds and everyday traffic noises, which had a viral internet presence and was reported by BBC America and the Daily Mirror (amongst numerous press items) and broadcast by BBC 6 and BBC Radio Leeds. See here for further details: http://madeinmidi.com/portfolio/cars-the-single-made-from-car-sounds/

Publications

Papers & Scores

• 2020 “Women in Music Production: A contextualized history from the 1890s to the 1980s.” In Perspectives on Music Production: Gender in Music Production, edited by R.Hepworth-Sawyer, J. Hodgson, Liesl King and Mark Marrington. New York: Routledge (forthcoming).
• 2019 “The DAW, electronic music aesthetics and genre transgression in music production: the case of heavy metal music.” In Perspectives on Music Production: Producing Music, edited by R.Hepworth-Sawyer, J. Hodgson and Mark Marrington. New York: Routledge.
• 2018 Journal of Music Technology and Education (Special MPEC Edition), guest editorial with R.Hepworth-Sawyer, 11/3 (2018).
• 2017 “From DJ to Djent-step: Technology and the Re-Coding of Metal Music since the 1980s.” Metal Music Studies, 3/2 (2017).
• 2017 “Composing in the Digital Audio Workstation.” In The Singer-­‐Songwriter Handbook, edited by J. Williams and K. Williams. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
• 2016 “Mixing Metaphors: Aesthetics, Mediation and the Rhetoric of Sound Mixing.” In Perspectives on Music Production: Mixing Music, edited by R.Hepworth-Sawyer and J. Hodgson. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• 2016 “Paradigms of Music Software Interface Design and Musical Creativity.” In Innovation in Music II, edited by R.Hepworth-Sawyer, J. Hodgson, J.L.Paterson and R.Toulson. Shoreham-by-Sea: Future Technology Press, 2016.
• 2016 “Denis ApIvor’s Variations Op. 29: Introduction to the Guitar Music of a Pioneering British Modernist.” Soundboard, 42/3 (2016).
• 2016 “Reconciling theory with practice in the teaching of songwriting.” In Cambridge Companion to the Singer Songwriter, edited by J. Williams and K. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• 2015 “Serial Technique in the early works of Denis ApIvor.” British Music, 38 (2015).
• 2014 “ ‘Music of the Cactus Land’: a consideration of musical style and text setting in Denis ApIvor’s The Hollow Men.” British Music, 36 (2014).
• 2011 “Experiencing Musical Composition in the DAW: The Software Interface as Mediator of the Musical Idea.” Journal on the Art of Record Production, 5 (2011). See https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/experiencing-musical-composition-in-the-daw-the-software-interface-as-mediator-of-the-musical-idea-2/
• 2006 “Denis ApIvor and the classical guitar.” Guitar Review, 132 (Fall 2006).
• 2005 “Denis ApIvor and his contribution to British opera and ballet” Musical Times, 146 (Summer 2005).
• 2004 Obituary for Denis ApIvor, Classical Guitar.
• 2004 Obituary for Denis ApIvor, Dancing Times.
• 2004 Nineteen Gilbert and Sullivan Favourites Arranged for the Classical Guitar (Mel Bay Publications).
• 2004 Guitar adviser for Anthony Marks’ Easy Guitar Tunes series of 3 books (Usborne Publishing).
• 1999 Guitar from Scratch (Boosey and Hawkes) with Chris Norton: wrote all text and assisted with composition.
• 1997 Reviewer for The Consort (Early Music Journal). Score review of Rudolph Dolmetsch, Concertino for Viola da Gamba and small orchestra; CD review of Hopkinson Smith, Instrucción De Música Sobre La Guitarra Española.
• 1996 “Aural Training for Guitarists” Classical Guitar (6 instalments across the year).