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Bio
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Biography
Mark Lybarger-Monson lives with his wife and two sons
in Camarillo, California. As a family, Mark, Kara, Jonah and Dylan explore nature
(parks, beaches and hiking trails), dance wildly while playing instruments,
sing spontaneously and generally act silly. Mark and Kara also enjoy meditation, yoga, spiritual
literature and the arts.
In December of 2008, Mark
received a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
At UCSB, he studied composition with Professor
Joel Feigin, interim Corwin Professor
Karen Tanaka, Kurt Rohde and Professor Curtis Roads. He
also studied classical piano with Hee-Kyung
Juhn and collaborative
piano with Professor
Anne Epperson. While attending UCSB, Mark was awarded seven Sherrill C.
Corwin-Metropolitan Theatres Awards in composition.
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Aesthetics
Before Mark was born, his mother bought
a piano with the intention of learning to play it while he was napping;
however, the converse occurred – at three years old, he explored its magic
while she slept. Throughout his youth, Mark studied improvisation more than
repertoire, paving the way for his creative musical disposition. Throughout his
life, Lybarger-Monson has drawn inspiration from meaningful relationships,
nature and various composers. At the age of sixteen, he began a spiritual
pursuit that has increasingly influenced his music.
In the fall of 2003, Mark realized that
he wanted to create music that was not only inspired by meditation, but that is
a meditation. Mark perceived that performers must be in a state of meditation
to express meditation in music. Therefore, to encourage meditative performance,
he began incorporating spiritual practices into the character and structure of
his compositions. These compositions function as templates that inspire and
guide meditation while allowing performers sufficient freedom to express
meditation spontaneously. In these works, performers are invited to consciously
experience their breath and/or heartbeat, then to spontaneously express rhythms,
phrases and gestures from this experience. Manifesting sounds from biological
functions and associated feelings assists the performers and audience members
in delving into the Consciousness that supports these functions. Mark enhances
the nexus of spiritually inspired composition and meditative improvisation by
incorporating sacred words, spatialization,
ratio-based rhythms and frequencies, simplicity, and moments of silence.
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Reviews
“In a rare instance of live, physical instrument enmeshed with
ones and zeroes (binary code), Mark Lybarger-Monson's ‘Primacy’ involved his
manipulations of a large, onstage gong, colluding with computer-generated
sounds.”
(Joseph
Woodward, “Interplanetary, Internalized Sounds : UCSB's Primavera Festival Made Computer the Focus of
Thursday's CREATE Concert,” The Santa Barbara Independent, 28 April 2008.)
“Choreographer Brittani Karhoff explored the
emotional dynamics of her relationship with her father in ‘A Breath of Air’ through
partner work and verbal expression. Karhoff also
explored the relationship between dancers and musicians in her effective
collaboration with Music Department graduate students Devin Burke on cello and
Mark Lybarger-Monson on piano. The duet between Cherise
Richards and Marcos Duran was a particular highlight. Overall, this intimate
program left no doubt that these are four exciting artists to watch.”
(Felicia M. Tomasko,
“Trafficking in Dreams,” The Santa Barbara Independent, 16 March 2006.)
Note:
5 performances: Thursday-Sunday, 8 p.m. and Sunday, 2 p.m., March 9-12, 2006
“The last two were from 21st-century
UCSB, elegant and mysterious works by Mark Lybarger-Monson (Merge with Dust,
Into a Silent Om).”
(Gerald Carpenter, “Time Travelers,” The Santa Barbara
Independent, 9 June 2005, p. 74.)
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