Mark Popkin
Phone: (336)770-3359
Email: popkinm@ncarts.edu

Mark Popkin has been a faculty member of the North Carolina School of the Arts since its founding in 1965. He received his B.A. degree in physics from Brooklyn College and his M.S. degree in industrial engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology. A scholarship student of the legendary Simon Kovar, he has been a member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center since its inception in 1966. He has performed as principal bassoon with the New Jersey Symphony, the New York Pops, the New York Choral Society and the Winston-Salem Symphony, and has played with the Houston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Casals Festival, the Madeira Bach Festival, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the New York Chamber Symphony, the New York City Center and Metropolitan Opera Orchestras, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, the Symphony of the Air, and the Columbia Records Orchestra. Popkin has performed and recorded with such eminent conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez, Igor Stravinsky, Gerard Schwarz, David Zinman, Hermann Scherchen, and Naeme Jarvi, and has appeared on Live From Lincoln Center on numerous occasions. He has been a soloist and conducted a master class at the Eastern Music Festival. He is the founder and director of the Glickman-Popkin Bassoon Camp http://www.bassooncamp.com and Mark Popkin’s Bassoon Camp By-the-Sea.

From 1965 to 1985 Popkin served as manager of the Clarion Wind Quintet, organizing concert tours in the United States, Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia, and the Caribbean, and teaching/performance residencies at Duke University and the University of Virginia. He also developed the American Music Project, supported by the Ditson Fund and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, to search out and record contemporary American compositions for wind quintet, culminating in a recording by the Clarion Wind Quintet on Golden Crest Records which was broadcast on the National Public Radio network.

He conceived, organized and administered an Arts-in-Education project from 1986 to 1994, funded by the Winston Salem Arts Council and the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, to bring instrumental music instruction to the public schools.

In addition to teaching bassoon and coaching chamber music at NCSA, Popkin has taught conducting, conducted the Preparatory Orchestra, organized and conducted the NCSA Wind Soloists. He developed and teaches the Woodwind Orchestral Repertory course. He formed the NCSA Chamber Music Society, which offers performances by NCSA faculty, graduate students, and alumni.

Popkin has given master classes throughout the USA as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. His wind transcriptions are published by Musica Rara, Editions Compusic, Alry Publications, and the Theodore Presser Company. The Opus Five Woodwind Quintet was awarded a 2001 Winston-Salem Arts Council Artists Projects grant to produce a CD of his transcriptions for wind quintet of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets.

Popkin also designs and produces important bassoon and contrabassoon reed making tools, marketed by the Clarion Music Company. His book, Bassoon Reed Making, Repair and Maintenance, third edition, published by the Instrumentalist Company, has been characterized as "the bassoonists’ bible."