Mark Alburger is an award-winning ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Monthly Journal, Music Theory and Literature Instructor at Diablo Valley College, and Music Critic for San Francisco Classical Voice and Commuter Times. Alburger began playing the oboe and composing with Dorothy and James Freeman, George Crumb, and Richard Wernick. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Joan Panetti and Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.), Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. Eight CDs of his music are available from North/South Consonance (Diversions [The Twelve Fingers] and American Tapestry [Symphony No. 1]), I Kill Me Music (Camino Real), and New Music (Early Oboe / Early Voice, Instruments of Deconstruction, Contrary Comotion, Desert Muse, Bass and Range, and A Windblown Rock in San Rafael). Three of Alburger’s operas — Cats, Dogs, and Divas (Harriet March Page), Waiting for Godot (after Samuel Beckett), and The Playboy of the Western World (J.M. Synge) — will be staged in 2007, respectively at Women on the Way Festival (January 19-20, Mission Dance Theatre), Fresh Voices VII Festival of New Music (June 15, 16, 22, 24, Goat Hall), and Oakland Metro Opera (August 23-26, 201 Broadway).

(Contribution by Michael Cooke <cooke@sfcco.org>)