Mark Seto
Assistant Professor of Music
Director, Connecticut College Orchestra
Joined Connecticut College: 2011
Education
Ph.D., M.Phil, Columbia University; B.A., Yale University
Specializations
Historical musicology
Orchestral conducting
19th-century music
Symphonic culture in fin-de-siècle Paris
Mark Seto joined Connecticut College in 2011 as an assistant professor of music and as director of the Connecticut College orchestra.
Seto leads a wide-ranging musical life as a musicologist, conductor, teacher, and violinist. He conducts the Connecticut College Orchestra and teaches courses in music theory and history, including Music 131, Foundational Theory for Musicians and Music 248, History of Music II.
As a musicologist, Seto’s principal areas of research are nineteenth-century orchestral music, aesthetics, nationalism, and performance. He has presented his research at national conferences including the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, the North American Conference on 19th-Century Music, Feminist Theory and Music, and the Harvard Lyrica Dialogues.
Working from manuscript sources, he has prepared performing materials and conducted western hemisphere premieres of works by Augusta Holmès and J. A. Hasse.
His most recent publication, on the choral music of Cherubini and Holmès, will appear in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (Routledge, forthcoming).
Seto is Co-Artistic Director and Conductor of the Chelsea Symphony and the founding Music Director of Morningside Opera, both in New York City. He has served as the assistant conductor of the New York Youth Symphony, Yale Symphony Orchestra, and Columbia University Orchestra. Recent engagements include collaborations with actors David Hyde Pierce and Charles Busch, and the world premiere of an original Handel pasticcio, Atra, ossia, l’amore ricordato, with Morningside Opera at The Ailey Citigroup Theater. His production of Hasse’s Alcide al bivio in 2009 was praised by Opera News as a “lively, well calibrated performance.” He studied at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Maine, where he served as an assistant to music director Michael Jinbo for two seasons. His conducting teachers include Lawrence Leighton Smith and Shinik Hahm, and he has participated in workshops with Kenneth Kiesler, Daniel Lewis, Donald Portnoy, Donald Thulean, and Paul Vermel.
Visit the music department website.
