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4. A New Way Forward

I elected to focus my dissertation on electro-acoustic composition; building randomised chance based synthesizers from motorway (freeway) traffic algorithms and other unpredictable triggers. Building chaos-instruments and twisting musical elements out of ‘found sound’ sample manipulation synthesis theory was my epiphany moment, akin to a spiritual awakening; music was indeed everywhere, “Music gives a soul to the universe”.

Every composition of mine can trace it’s lineage back to this simple doctine, and as such I continue to obsessively collect and curate an ever growing database of organic sounds from my surroundings. Furthermore, the Hyundai upright overstrung piano in my studio – itself a distant heir to the old battered piano from my childhood – also assumes rather unconventional part in my composition process; The wooden form has inumerable mechanical eccentricities and as such is an excellent channel for percussive performance – with some sensitive post-production, recordings resonate in a uniquely homogenic way with those of conventional piano performance.



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3. Home Town Heroes

Luckily for me the nearest town boasted an extremely healthy music scene, and virtually all my friends back then were musicians too. Fast Forward through years of playing in punk bands in local dive venues, to experimental avant-guarde noise-nik pseudo post modern pretentiousness in basement clubs, museums and art galleries, to touring Europe playing with a support band to the world’s (then) premier death metal act… my music appreciation enjoyed unlimited access to everything available to me.

I soaked it all in.

I then enrolled in a university degree program to study towards a bachelors in music, which certainly opened my eyes to further opportunities in the music industry, but more importantly grounded me with a new found respect and discipline for methodical practice and devotion to instrument study.

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2. The Piano

The Piano

I began classical piano studies at the age of five, progressing through the ABRSM grades and discovering that I could play almost everything I heard by ear, i.e. without sheet notation. My relative pitch recognition also came in handy later in my teenage years when, together with new friends, I set out to discover everything from electronic music to jazz, metal to folk… I became enthralled to countless new worlds of musical expression and the crazier the better.

Teenage bands were formed. Strange new instruments were picked up and passed around until the ‘right fit’ was found. In those years I was sometimes a bassist, occasionally a lead singer or a terrible guitarist – but more often than not I settled for the familiarity of my beloved eighty-eight keys, feeling a palpable ingrained symbiosis from long years spent with my grandfather’s old piano…



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1. Islander

Thanks for finding me!

I’m Mark Peter Royce, a British composer living and working in Vienna, Austria.

I grew up in Essex, England, on Mersea Island – Britain’s most easterly populated island. Sabine Baring Gould, the celebrated Victorian author (and once parish priest of East Mersea) wrote of the island in his novel Mehalah “A more desolate region can scarce be conceived, and yet it is not without beauty.”

My childhood was forged in the gothic atmosphere of these bleak marshlands and desolate saltings, the lonely plaintive chant of seabirds on the wind; Mersea’s long winters shaped my appreciation for the dramatic and melancholic, and my emerging music compositions grew out of this powerful dynamic.

Following in the footsteps of generations of my islander ancestors, I learned to sail and fish; to spot the wind shifts and to read the weather from cloud formations. I rejoiced in the inevitable storms that fell on our small island community – capricious and unannounced –  but this was only the backdrop to the tale of my adolescence; it was my beloved grandfather’s overstrung (and ever so slightly out of tune) upright piano that was the source of my obsession.