MARK AND MUSIC, AND OTHER MUSINGS

-- Jean Seiler

Mark showed a sense of rhythm and music from a very early age. How much was inherited, and how much was due to feeling the vibrations of my bass viola da gamba when he was still in utero? In any case, there it was.

When he was an infant, he would lie patiently listening to me practice if I put him on his back on the floor where he could watch my right hand moving the bow back and forth. We often sang to him -- nursery rhymes, lullabies, and lots of other songs.

When Mark was maybe three years old we gave him a Fisher-Price xylophone, which came with a music holder and a booklet of simple tunes in color-coded notes. Before he would play a single note on the xylophone, he set it up just like his Dad’s hammered dulcimer (which was on a stand, with a seat, with some music on a music stand): he put the xylophone on a low stool, brought his booster seat from the dining room to sit on, and inserted the music holder and put the music booklet on it. Only then would he give the instrument a try.

Sometime around then we were at a wedding reception, chatting with other people at our table and not paying attention to the fact that Mark had left the table. When the bride’s mother came over and said, “Did you see what your son is doing?” we thought, “Uh-oh, has he gotten into trouble?” But it wasn’t that at all. He’d taken his booster seat over beside the platform where the band was playing, and he was sitting on the floor and drumming on the booster seat in perfect rhythm with the band! The bride’s mother was so impressed, she wanted to make sure we saw it.

In the car we tended to listen to classical music stations on the radio (no tape deck nor CDs in those days), but Mark kept asking for “hard and tough” music -- we have no idea where he came up with that phrase. We weren’t into rock, so our compromise was to listen to country music (though that wasn’t “hard and tough” enough to satisfy him).

At some program we took Mark to when he was about five he got to try a piano, and it must have made quite an impression because weeks later we heard him telling a friend of ours that he was going to learn to play piano. “Hmmm,” we said, “guess we’d better get a piano!” So we did. As soon as it arrived, he asked me to teach him a song, so I showed him how to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He caught on right away, with all the correct fingering including the shift of position. He wanted to learn other songs, and since my memories of piano technique were very hazy and I didn’t want to lead him astray, I found a teacher who was willing to take him that young. From the start, she had him learn three ways -- from written notes, by ear, and improvising. He picked it up pretty quickly (though as he continued over the next few years he got less and less inclined to practice!). For the first few weeks I sat in, at the teacher’s insistence, but Mark soon noticed that the students who came before and after him didn’t have a parent in tow, and he persuaded the teacher to treat him the same.

We often took our folk instruments with us when we were visiting friends or attending Quaker gatherings, so when Mark was six we got him an electronic keyboard so that he could take his instrument along and join in too.

Mark composed one piano piece when he was eight, for a competition that his teacher wanted him to enter. He composed by playing with a tape recorder on, then I transcribed what he’d recorded. Entries had to be in the key of A minor; I don’t think there were any other requirements. He incorporated chord patterns and scales that he’d been doing in his lessons, but in a very melodic way, and with an impressive natural sense of balance and contrast. He named the piece “Skiing in the Alps,” because of the rising and falling lines. I don’t recall whether it ended up in the competition, but he did perform it in the annual student recital. He didn’t compose any more pieces during those years, whether from feeling that he couldn’t surpass what he’d done or from a sense of “been there, done that.”

In fifth grade, he took percussion at school. I’d had a strong feeling when he was very young that someday he’d play percussion, so I’d resigned myself to it long since, but actually, by the time we got him a drum set the following year he was already very good, so it was fine to listen to. He played percussion in the school band in sixth and seventh grade (and probably eighth), and took private lessons.

In the summer of 1989, Mark attended a camp that did a lot of performing arts. He was given a full load of theater, but one of his letters home said, in his characteristic phonetic spelling: “I did get in the band though. In the band there’s Todd (screech gitaur), Alex (percushin & guitaur), Greg ((counseller and head of band) guitar and mabey keyboard), and Me (precushin). We’re The Smashed Infants, and we’re loud as all get-out!” He enclosed a very graphic full-page drawing of a Smashed Infant. He also had his first video lesson, and did a radio DJ hour using an eclectic mix of music -- a foretaste of things to come. The following summer at camp he organized a band, and they performed in the camp talent show.

George and I had gotten involved in Sacred Harp (shape-note) singing, and took Mark with us to some of the weekend singing conventions. One of these was preceded by a singing school taught by Hugh McGraw, a renowned singing master from Georgia, with particular attention to how to lead a song from the center of the traditional square of singers. The next day, Mark told me at the break that he wanted to lead “Northfield” (a popular Sacred Harp song that was on a t-shirt we’d given him -- he was wearing the t-shirt but I hadn’t realized he’d given attention to the song). In the middle of the song, the four voice parts come in one after another, and he checked with me to make sure he knew which side of the square to turn to for each entrance. When his turn came, he got up in the center and led the song exactly right, and when he finished, Hugh McGraw said, “Boy, you done excellent!” George decided that if Mark could lead, George had better get up the nerve to lead too. Mark eventually overdosed on Sacred Harp because we played tapes in the car on trips so much, so he went back to his heavy metal rock, but he still sometimes came to conventions with us and helped with child care.

When he was fourteen, he bought a used electric guitar and a small amp, and with a few pointers from a friend he taught himself to play. Later the same year he bought an electric bass. The following year, 1992, he joined a garage band as percussionist, and they literally practiced in our garage for a while. That year he also landed a job as Production Assistant for a music video program, “The Music Machine,” aired weekly on the community access cable TV channel. He suggested material, sorted recordings, designed and distributed advertising flyers, and occasionally went into New York City to help tape interviews of performers. It was an unpaid job, but he was rewarded with tapes and CDs and posters.

In eleventh and twelfth grades, at a boarding school in Maine, he kept up his musical interests, arranging and playing songs with some of his classmates in the school talent shows.

In the fall of 1995 Mark entered Alfred University in western New York State. He started out in the engineering school there, since he’d been thinking for several years of having a career in audio engineering, but after one semester he transferred into the college of liberal arts because he found he didn’t have sufficient background for the engineering program (and there was no audio component). As he said, “I should have brought a lawn chair to college, so that I could more easily lie back and watch it all going over my head!” He did host a middle-of-the-night program on the college radio station, and also enjoyed jamming with fellow musicians and playing in a rock band. In 1996 he made his blue guitar with the help of a friend.

Mark and his good friend Tem McEwen were already business partners, and they set up the lsds.com server and also the Underground Psychosound recording label. When Mark left Alfred University at the end of 1996 he headed for Albany and got a job doing tech support with Tem at an Internet service provider. He played bass in a band, with occasional gigs at a local club.

In 1999 (now living near Kingston, NY, where he worked for a small computer firm) he created and produced his multimedia techno-rock CD “Book of Dreams,” on the Underground Psychosound label. The following year he moved to Maine to work in Belfast with a friend who had a recording distributorship specializing in ska, which had become one of Mark’s strong musical interests.

Later he changed jobs and moved to Bangor. When we were up there for a visit, he gave us a demonstration of his scratch-DJ skills. We were fascinated to see the process firsthand, and impressed with the creativity and complexity involved.

Another passion was the music of noted rock musician Moby, and Mark redesigned and maintained the fan website mobymusic.com. Over a number of years he also collected all the Moby recordings and memorabilia he could get his hands on.

Mark entered the University of Maine at the beginning of 2002, majoring in New Media (“all the stuff I’ve been doing on my own, but with better equipment”). He met the challenge of class requirements by dreaming up projects that interested him. (This was nothing new; in high school, when assigned to make a pillow for a home ec class, he’d made a life-size pillow version of his white electric guitar.) For instance, when told to do an annotated bibliography in lieu of taking an English course, he persuaded the professor to let him instead do an annotated discography of Moby’s recordings, which he posted and maintained on the web. The crowning example was his senior capstone project, the production of a technically precise vinyl record for scratch-DJs.

Mark collaborated with his digital art teacher, Ralph DiLuzio, on two pieces of installation art, for which Mark did the audio engineering. The first one, “Eucharist,” opened in Italy and then was on display at The Project Room, a Philadelphia gallery. He went down to Philadelphia for the opening and DJ’d the party.

At home he played in several bands, notably Skawabunga and This Car Climbed Mount Washington. He DJ’d any chance he could get, on his own and with live bands, earning respect from his colleagues for his skill and for his amazingly extensive collection of vinyl. He told us proudly that one magazine had hailed him as “the unsung hero of the Maine DJ scene.”