Mark Zaki
Area Head of Music Program
Professor of Music
Ph.D. Princeton University
markzaki@rutgers.edu
www.markzaki.com
(856) 225-6239
Fine Arts Building Rm. 203
Biography
Building on his many diverse interests, composer and violinist Mark Zaki’s work ranges from historically-informed and traditional chamber music to electroacoustic music, mixed-media composition, and music for film. He recently was a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield (UK) as the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to the United Kingdom. Dr Zaki has also been honored with awards and recognition from the International Society of Contemporary Music, Musica Nova (Prague), a Rutgers University Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, and a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Zaki holds a Ph.D. degree in composition from Princeton University.
Zaki’s music and mixed-media composition has been presented by the NY Philharmonic Biennial, MIN Ensemblet (Norway), the Nash Ensemble of London, Speculum Musicae, New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto), the Boston and NYC Visual Music Marathons, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Third Practice, iFIMPaC (Leeds, UK), the Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey Concert Series, the Comunidad Electroacoustica de Chile (Santiago), Festival Oude Muziek (Utrecht), Nashville SoundCrawl, the Not Still Art Festival (NYC), the International Computer Music Conference, Nuit Bleue (France), Electrolune (France), Primavera en La Habana (Cuba), Musica Nova (Prague), the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, SEAMUS, the Florida Electronic Music Festival, the NWEAMO Festival (San Diego), the New Music Miami ISCM Festival, the Cycle de Concerts de Musique par Ordinateur (Paris), the Pulse Field International Exhibition of Sound Art (Atlanta), and on the Canadian Electroacoustic Community CD project DisContact! III.
His commercial credits include work on more than 50 films, television programs, theater productions and recordings for companies such as PBS, Paramount TV, Disney, Touchstone Pictures, Buena Vista Pictures, Sony/Classical, and Chandos. Notable projects include original scores for the dramatic feature film The Eyes of van Gogh, and the Peabody award nominated documentary The Political Dr Seuss for PBS. His film work also includes both onscreen and soundtrack performances in Lasse Hallstrom’s Casanova, the American release of Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, Martin Scorsese’s The Key to Reserva and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce.
Dr Zaki includes among his teachers Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, Charles Wuorinen, and Arnold Steinhardt. On the faculty at Rutgers University-Camden, Dr Zaki also directs the Music program and the Rutgers Electro-Acoustic Lab (REAL). He has also served nationally as the president of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS).
Research Interests
- Composition of acoustic and electroacoustic music, mixed-media, film scoring, and computer-generated visual music.
- Interpretation and realization of new music (especially with an electroacoustic component), and also historically-informed practices and performance.
- Examination of the behaviors and practices of large scale multimedia performance networks. This also focuses on identifying and defining compositional processes that unify diverse and autonomous media sources and control mechanisms.
- Exploring open-source tools and solutions as a platform for Digital Media pedagogy.