Mark Heinemann Bio

Mark has had a long and varied career as musician, composer, performer and educator.

He studied music at C.W. Post College and Queens College in New York City. In New York, he apprenticed to composer Carman Moore.

As composer he has written numerous works for radio, dance and musical theater, including a full-length musical based on the life of William Butler Yeats entitled Passionate Voyage: The Life of William Butler Yeats, which made use of Butler's poetry, writings, and traditional Irish music. This project was funded by the Vermont Council on the Arts in 1983.

He has also been Composer in Residence at the American Dance Festival at Duke University (1986).

Mark has written several children's musicals, which have been produced and performed locally, including

• East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1993; and
• The Blanket, 1995, a musical based on a Russian folk tale (play written by Nancy Monson).

The Blanket has been recorded on cassette and issued on the Encouraging Hands Music label.

More recently (1999), Mark Heinemann was Artist in Residence at the September School in Boulder, where he collaborated with staff and students to produce a musical based on West Side Story, which was appropriately named Sep Side Story.

As educator he has taught extensively at The School, a private K-5 school in Boulder and The Experimental College in Seattle, Washington.

Mark's insatiable hunger to learn and study music has given him the opportunity to play and perform in genres and bands as far afield as Classical, Blues, Bluegrass, Rock and Roll, Traditional Celtic Music, Jazz, and the Avant-Garde.

He has studied, performed and recorded with Carman Moore, Leroy Jenkins, Sam Rivers, Art Lande, Ty Burhoe and the Juillard Orchestra.

In 1998 he co-founded The Rude Masters, an electric guitar quartet, and is now a member of Delinquent Borrower and the Librarians, a stand-and-deboogie Blues dance band.

In 1996, Mark founded the Encouraging Hands Music School, which enrolls over 100 students a year in classes, workshops, and private lessons.