Biography
Mark Small is a guitarist, composer, and music journalist who has spent the majority of his life in New England. He has composed classical, jazz, pop, and sacred music for chorus, wind ensemble, orchestra, piano, and guitar. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in classical guitar performance from New England Conservatory and California State University, Fullerton. He also studied guitar and composition at Berklee College of Music, and served for 26 years as editor of Berklee Today magazine.
An active music journalist, Mark has written for Guitar Player, DownBeat, Acoustic Guitar, Soundboard, Classical Guitar, and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal among other publications.
Mark and Robert Torres worked as the Small-Torres Guitar Duo for 18 years and recorded six CDs of sacred and classical guitar music that received three nominations for Pearl Awards. The duo played throughout America on stage, television, and radio. The appeared in three live televised broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word accompanying the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square in Salt Lake City (formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir).
Fast Falls the Eventide was an additional duo recording Mark made with fellow guitarist Peter Clemente for the Joy Spring Records label in 2006. Its tracks featured their guitars in solo, duo, chamber music, and orchestral settings. The album received radio airplay nationwide and was nominated for two Pearl Awards. Mark’s first solo album, Scenes, came out in 2011, and spotlights his original compositions and arrangements for solo guitar. His second solo album, Toward a Fork in the Road from 2021, showcases his own compositions as well as arrangements of music ranging from Sibelius to Sting.
Mark penned an arrangement of Pat Metheny’s “Letter from Home” for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet’s album Guitar Heroes. The disc won a Grammy Award in 2005 for "best classical crossover album.” The quartet also performed Mark’s arrangement on the LAGQ Live DVD, released by Mel Bay Publications.
Mark’s solo guitar piece “Mississippi Revisited” won second place in the VIII International Composition Competition of the Corfu Festival held in Corfu, Greece, August 2005. His Allegretto, Elegy, and Passacaglia received honorable mention in the 2017 Boston GuitarFest composition competition. His music is published by Canadian publisher Les Production d’Oz and Mel Bay Publications. Guitarists Irina Kulikova, Bill Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, and others have featured Mark’s works in their programs. As for his journalistic pursuits, Mark continues to write for music magazines and his biography of Lee Berk (second president and namesake of Berklee College of Music) was published in April of 2025 by Hal Leonard and can be found in bookstores and on Amazon under the title Lee Berk: Leading in the Berklee Way.