Mark Edgley Smith


Mark Edgley-Smith was a British composer. He was born in Wimbledon and educated at Tiffin School, Kingston upon Thames. There it was soon apparent that he was equally gifted as artist, composer, and litterateur/wit. It was at Tiffin that he began to compose seriously and had his first composition lessons, from David Nield. He won a scholarship to read music at the Queen's College, Oxford, but left with a third. Why that was so is not clear, but the most likely explanation is that his talent was out of chime with the Glockian-Darmstardt times, then enforced in oxon as too in cantab.
Smith's 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.
Mark Edgley Smith had a daughter, Anna February Edgley-Smith, and a son, Milo Henry Edgley-Smith. He died in Cheltenham, aged 53.

Chronological List of Compositions