J. Mark Scearce (born October 9, 1960) is an American composer known for his musical settings of more than 200 texts by forty poets—from art songs to operas to works for chorus and orchestra. Early life J. Mark Scearce was born in Edina, Missouri and grew up in neighboring Kirksville. There he graduated high school in 1979, and attended Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State), graduating in 1983. At NMSU he triple-majored in music theory, horn performance, and philosophy & religion. During high school and college, Scearce established himself as a jazz trumpeter, winning outstanding soloist awards at regional jazz festivals (St. Charles, Wichita, Springfield). Despite acceptance at North Texas to pursue this trajectory, Scearce chose to become a contemporary classical composer after his undergraduate studies, attending Indiana University on the strength of his first composition, a brass quintet written for and recorded by the Chicago Brass Quintet. Scearce received his Masters and Doctorate in Music Composition from Indiana in 1986 and 1993 respectively. Career and influences Scearce’s catalogue of music compositions totals nearly a thousand performances of sixty works, including seven commercial recordings on the Delos, Warner Bros, Capstone, Centaur, Albany, and Equilibrium labels. Having formally studied with composers John Eaton, Harvey Sollberger, and Donald Erb—all of whom had deep and lasting influences on his music—Scearce only developed his characteristic tonal style with the work Gaea’s Lament, written in 1989 for cellist and ethnomusicologist Jonathan Kramer, whom Scearce met fresh out of graduate school in North Carolina and whose eclectic holistic teaching highly influenced him. His associations with other performers and performing organizations shaped many of the forty commissions he received for his music since. Conductor Al Sturgis has conducted two ballets, two operas, two choral/orchestral works, and six choral works. Conductor John Gordon Ross has conducted thirty-three performances of eight orchestral works. Endymion’s Sleep, Anima Mundi, and This Thread were borne from Scearce’s association with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and its Music Director Paul Gambill. Six works were performed by the North Carolina Symphony (including XL, Urban Primitive, and Antaeus) and twice that by the Carolina Ballet (including The Kreutzer Sonata, Guernica, and Dracula) for a total of 150 performances between these two organizations alone. Second to vocal music, his music for ballet has made the greatest impact with audiences, brought about through a close working relationship with choreographer Robert Weiss with whom he has created six