 Mark Morton is the Artistic Director of the American School of Double Bass® which draws students, teachers, and professionals from all over the United States to its summer retreats, private lessons, workshops, and masterclasses. Assistant Professor of Double Bass at Texas Tech University, Morton is also Principal Bass of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, and the first prize winner of the International Society of Bassists Solo Competition in New York City. He is also on the faculty of the Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific in Powell River, British Columbia. Former teaching positions include Instructor of Double Bass at Capital University, and the assistant double bass instructor for Gary Karr at the Hartt School of Music.
Mark Morton has soloed in Europe, South America, the United States and Canada, and has been a featured double bass soloist on radio broadcasts including NPR's "Performance Today," WGBH (Boston), and WQXR (New York). As a recording artists, he has released his Thresholds and Russian Rendezvous CD’s, and shares a compact disc with world-renowned bassist Gary Karr of solo double bass music by Paul Ramsier. It was with that CD that Classical CD Reviews hailed him as “a most artistic representative of the new generation developed in the last half century.”
An accomplished pianist, Morton began his musical studies on both the double bass and piano. By the age of seventeen he had performed as piano soloist with several orchestras including the Houston Symphony Orchestra. He then focused his musical energies on the double bass, earning the undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Juilliard School in New York. He subsequently went on to be only the second bassist to receive the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in the history of that institution.
As an author, he has written and published the "Dr. Morton" series of books on the art of bass playing. He has had many articles appear in Strings, Bass World, American String Teacher magazines, as well the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
As a soloist, Mark Morton performs on a string bass made circa 1775 in Naples, Italy by Gennaro Vinnacia. When playing in the bass section of the Columbus Symphony, he performs on a large double bass, also made in Naples, by Antonio Gagliano in 1805.
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