Biography
Toronto-born composer, music theorist, and pianist Mark Richards is currently on faculty at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, teaching courses in music theory, music history, and the music of Beethoven. At the same time, Richards is also working on two commissions to compose new works. The first is an opera on Laura Secord, the Canadian heroine of the War of 1812, to be performed by Music Niagara in a workshop in 2012 and in a fully staged version in 2013. The second is a children's opera commissioned by Toronto's Off Centre Music Salon on the story of Thumbelina, based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen.
In 2004, Richards began writing both the music and libretto of his full-length opera Hamlet, completing both a piano and chamber orchestra version in 2008. In 2008, the orchestral version received a workshop and public concert reading at Stratford Summer Music. For this workshop, Richards was featured in an article in The Toronto Star.
Richards completed a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) in Toronto in 2002. In 2004, Richards began graduate studies in music theory at the University of Toronto, completing a Master’s degree in 2007 and a Doctorate degree in 2011, for which he received a prestigious three-year Doctoral Award from from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. An accomplished pianist, Richards also holds ARCT diplomas from the RCM in both piano performance and piano teaching.
Updated January 2012