Marcus Macauley, born in Seattle in 1985, has been playing the piano since he was three and currently studies with Peter Mack. He has been studying composition for the past six years with Janice Giteck. For two summers at the Aspen Music School, he studied composition with George Tsontakis and piano with John Perry. At the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival last summer, he studied for six weeks with composers Samuel Adler and George Crumb. In addition, for three years he was a student at the Academy of Music Northwest in Seattle, where his primary teachers were James Paul and Dorothy Klotzman. Most recently he was invited, with three other composers, to attend the National Youth Orchestra Festival, where he worked with composer-in-residence Jennifer Higdon.
Marcus's compositions have received national awards including an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a BMI Student Composer Award, the Chamber Music Prize from the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts and the Hartt School, and first prize in the Austin Peay State University Young Composers Competition and in the Natalie and Murray S. Katz Young Composers Competition, co-sponsored by Collage New Music and the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. His works have been performed by cellist Truls Mørk, the Ensemble Sospeso, Ensemble Eleven, Collage New Music, members of the Seattle Symphony, and students at the Aspen Music School, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, the Academy of Music Northwest, and the National Youth Orchestra Festival.
As a pianist, Marcus has won many local and statewide awards and competitions, including the Helen Crow Snelling and Simon Fiset piano competitions, the Washington State Solo and Ensemble Contest, and the Seattle Young Artists Music Festival Concerto Playoffs. He has performed with the Sammamish Symphony, Orchestra Seattle, the Bellevue Youth Symphony, Philharmonia Northwest, and the Seattle Symphony. Marcus is currently a senior at Mercer Island High School, where he plays cello in the orchestra and piano in the jazz ensemble.