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.
