Composer Mark Abel is a resident of the town of Sonoma. A rock musician and producer in New York as a young man, he began developing his classical compositional style during a 20+-year career in the newspaper world, most notably as Foreign Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. His music began to circulate more widely after he became affiliated in 2012 with the Delos label, which has released six Abel albums.

Abel’s idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing. Over time he has developed an unusual, sturdily constructed hybrid of classical, rock and jazz, constantly working toward new and more refined expressions of that synthesis. He primarily writes vocal music, whose contours extend from art song to larger forms involving the orchestra to a 103-minute opera, Home Is a Harbor. Abel moved  into chamber music with the album The Cave of Wondrous Voice, released in 2020.

A lyricist of considerable emotional power, Abel has also set poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda, and California poets Kate Gale and Joanne Regenhardt. His projects have attracted esteemed musicians including Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann, Juno Award laureate Isabel Bayrakdarian, clarinetist David Shifrin, cellists Fred Sherry and Jonah Kim, and pianists Carol Rosenberger, Robert Koenig and Dominic Cheli.

The Journal of Singing’s Gregory Berg has called Abel “a composer with bold and ambitious ideas …, with an impressive body of work that grows by the day,” while Pizzicato Magazine labeled him “one of the most interesting figures in American contemporary music.” Fanfare’s Huntley Dent wrote: “(Few) current songwriters rival Abel’s intriguing texts and their reach into so many psychological and cultural issues. Meaning and melody go hand in hand in a very contemporary way."