Mark was born in Victoria BC, Canada on October 2, 1953.  He remembers being mesmerized, at around age 3, by the sight and sound of his Dad, Gordon, playing Boogie Woogie on the family piano.  Two years later, when Mark started taking piano lessons from his Grandma (on his Mom’s side), Marie Young, he wrote his first song.  At age 7, he was taking violin lessons from Frona Colquhoun.  By the time he was 15, Mark had sung in a Gregorian Chant choir, participated in Ms. Colquhoun’s student-string quartet, and performed in his junior high school’s string orchestra and with the Victoria Youth String Orchestra.  He was also, by then, the eldest of ten children and the Beatles had become a part of his psyche. 

When Mark graduated from Mt. Douglas Senior Secondary School in 1971, he had taken 8 years of violin lessons and 12 years of piano lessons (up to Grade X Toronto Conservatory).  But he much preferred to play ‘by ear’.  By this time, he had composed more than a dozen instrumental songs.  He also liked cars and was technically/mechanically inclined. A year later, he was living in Vancouver and soon found work as a Traffic Engineering Technician.

Embracing the mind-expanding counterculture of the time and the opportunities that presented themselves, Mark became increasingly aware of important social justice, environmental, and animal rights issues.  At age 20, for example, he became a vegetarian and stopped wearing animal products.  These issues also started to make their way into Mark’s music when, at age 24 or so, he started writing lyrics.  Naturally enough, his lyrics tended to call for progressive social change.  He also wrote a few love songs.

At around the same time, Mark joined his first band: Bargain at Half the Price.  He sang bass and played violin for a year with the 18-piece, lefty-political folk/rock ensemble.  They recorded an album and performed at political events and numerous concerts throughout BC, singing mainly about peace and labour issues.  This life-changing experience set Mark firmly on a musical pathway and left him with some life-long friends.

All the while, Mark continued writing songs on his piano.  Feeling the itch to play piano in a band, he bought a Fender Rhodes electric piano.  Soon, he was a member of the indie-rock band UDYLI.  He also performed as a soloist or in a duo in lounges, coffee houses, restaurants, recitals, talent shows, and contests, and for weddings and other special events.

In 1979, Mark left the band and quit his job to attend BC Institute of Technology (BCIT) full-time to earn an Operations Management diploma.

In early 1991, The Fault disbanded while it was in pre-production with Paul Hyde, in preparation to record the group’s first CD.  Not wanting to waste all that pre-production work, Mark and Sue decided to carry that project on, but to record just their own songs.  With help from their friends, including Paul Hyde, The Fault bassist Rob Marr, the folks at PoolWest Records, and many others, they completed the project under the name U.N.I. They released an album on cassette but didn’t perform live together until 1999 (see below).

Ever versatile, Mark continued to explore solo music performance, including improvising along with the Theatre Sports improv-comedy troupe on Rookie Nights and playing live music in a couple of Fringe Festival productions.

In 1995, Mark, now 41, put his invention-project to rest.  It’s a story in itself.  He also quit his day-job, became a vegan, and moved back to Victoria, BC, where he was born, to earn a joint-BA in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Victoria (UVic).  After earning the (Honours) degree in 1999, he proceeded onto earning a MA in Sociology.  During this time, Mark continued performing solo piano gigs, including a 2+ year weekly lounge stint at the Union Club.  He also volunteered with the Victoria Branch of the UN Association in Canada (UNAC) and, in 1999, became its President.  And he became a Board Member of the Vancouver Island Musicians’ Association (AFM Local 247).

Also in 1999, Mark rejoined former bandmate Sue Baim.  She, too, had earlier returned to her home-town of Victoria.  She persuaded Mark to direct and arrange the music for a musical theatre production that she envisioned about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli.  Following Sue’s amazing portrayal of Liza in the show (which played at the McPherson Theatre), Sue and Mark resurrected U.N.I and performed as a duo in bars, clubs, retirement homes, and senior care facilities around Victoria.

Since the 1980s, Mark incorporated synthesized strings into much of his playing.  In the late 2000s, he had begun writing specific string arrangements for some of his songs.  When he left one2many, it was to find a way to perform his music with string musicians.  In 2011, he debuted the piano quintet (piano+string quartet) performance of two of his songs at his high school’s 40th anniversary concert at the Alix Goolden Hall in Victoria, BC.  For the next two years, he, with his piano trio, performed his music at numerous recitals around town. 

A highlight for Mark was when, in 2013, Erato Ensemble, a Vancouver-based art-song chamber ensemble, performed his song “Message to Home” at Vancouver’s Orpheum Annex, with Mark in the audience – a first for him.  At the above-right is the video recording of that performance. Following that, Mark started scoring and arranging his songs for piano, strings, and voice, in earnest. 

Mark, now in his 60s, decided that he had better record the original piano arrangements of all of his songs at least reasonably well, before he could no longer recall or play them.  So, in 2014-15, he recorded them in his living room on the 1906 upright piano on which he wrote most of them. 

Mark subsequently also wanted to flesh some of his songs out, with strings, guitars, drums, and vocals.  And he wanted to do so such that a rudimentary story of the android Jonnē Krōm would be told.  So, in 2017-20, he assembled the group Big Speck.  To date, they have performed one concert – an oratorio – and recorded an album.

Around this time and prompted by the need for a band practice/recording space, Mark arranged to convert his garage into a semi-pro recording studio. Except for the drums and double bass, the Big Speck album “Message to Home” was recorded there.

In 2019, Maestro Charles Job requested Mark to arrange his song “Message to Home” for performance by his 26-piece Palm Court Light Orchestra. Mark did so and the orchestra managed to give the piece a pre-rehearsal run-through before COVID-19 put the concert on indefinite hold.

In 2020, Mark focused sharing his music and his concerns for the Earth and its inhabitants that he expresses through it; hence, this website.  His lifelong love of music and his activism have mutually influenced each other, informed, in good part, by what Mark imagines how Earth would appear to an objective observer. 

Mark wonders … how would Earth appear to an objective, intergalactic traveller?  Perhaps its first impression would be:

“This planet is a beautiful, wild, and wonderful place.  But there is an intelligent, self-aware, disease here that is destroying it.”