Mark Zuckerman (b. 1948) had his first public performance at age 11 with a piece he wrote for his grade school orchestra. His formal music studies began at the Juilliard Preparatory Division and continued at the University of Michigan, Bard College (AB 1970) and Princeton University (PhD 1976).
Zuckerman’s composition teachers include David Epstein, George B. Wilson (U. of M.), Elie Yarden (Bard), and Milton Babbitt and J. K. Randall (Princeton).
Zuckerman’s music is published by Carl Fischer, Mobart Music, ACA, the APNM, Transcontinental Music, and Mazic Music. His music is recorded on Centaur Records, Phoenix USA, Living Artists, CRI, DGK Records, and YIVO and been performed at a number of venues in New York City and New Jersey. His collection of a cappella choral arrangements of Yiddish songs has been performed on four continents and his pieces for young musicians has been played by school and festival ensembles in New York, Maryland, Ohio and Saskatchewan.
Zuckerman has taught music at Princeton and Columbia Universities, teaching a wide variety of subjects ranging from a popular jazz survey course to graduate courses on esoteric twentieth-century music theory to computer music.
He also played saxophone in stage bands, clarinet, sax and keyboards in rock bands, washtub bass in bluegrass and jug bands, and has sung in several Yiddish choirs.
He has published Listen…Hear, an introductory book on listening to jazz, and a number of scholarly and technical papers on jazz, musical analysis, and digital sound synthesis. He has been an Associate Editor of Perspectives of New Music and has lectured, presented papers, and moderated talks at various schools and conferences including the American Musicological Society, Music Computation Conferences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois, the University of Washington, and the Polytechnic Institute of New York.
He is a member of the American Composers Alliance (ACA); the Society of Composers, Inc.; the American Music Center; the American Composers Forum; and the Center for Promotion of Contemporary Composers. He has served on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Contemporary Music and the National Yiddish Book Center and is currently serving on the Board of Governors of ACA.