Mark Edgley Smith, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetMark Edgley Smith
British composer
Date of Birth: 20-Mar-1955
Date of Death: 26-Jul-2008
Profession: composer
Nationality: United Kingdom
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About Mark Edgley Smith
- Mark Edgley-Smith [the hyphen disappeared at some-point] (20 March 1955 – 26 July 2008) 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 (which was how he would later earn his living), 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 (1974) 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 (The House of Sleep).
- Sometimes these extremes can be found in a single work, as in the five madrigals to poems by e e cummings (1994), 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 (Songs my Auntie Taught Me), the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble.(Fanfares for Forgotten Occasions), the Tippett Quartet (string quartet) and the composer-pianist Robert Keeley («People of Liberated City …»). Mark Edgley Smith had a daughter, Anna February Edgley-Smith (born 25 February 1983), and a son, Milo Henry Edgley-Smith (born 4 May 1999).
- He died in Cheltenham, aged 53.
Read more at Wikipedia