A versatile performer, composer and arranger, Mark Duggan has been active in multiple musical genres for over 40 years. Duggan’s passionate blend of contemporary percussion idioms has impressed audiences worldwide, ranging from the Tongyeong Music Festival in Korea and Lincoln Center in New York, to the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Based in Toronto, Canada, Duggan has performed with the Philip Glass Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain de Paris with Pierre Boulez, the percussion group Nexus, and appears regularly with the Toronto Symphony, New Music Concerts and the Esprit Orchestra. Duggan has collaborated with many contemporary composers including Jorg Widman, Vinko Globokar, George Benjamin, Toru Takemitsu, George Crumb, Matthias Pintscher, Charles Wuorinen, and Lou Harrison. He is also a founding member of Canada’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan (since 1983) which has toured throughout Europe, Asia and the US.Duggan has performed with many jazz and popular music artists including Diana Krall, Charlie Haden, Maria Schneider, Petula Clark, Kiran Ahluwalia, Maryem Tollar, Andy Stochansky, Nelly Furtado, Oliver Schroer, Don Ross, Kevin Barrett, Rufus Wainwright and for ten years, performed and recorded extensively with his own group, Vuja dé. He has been deeply involved with Brazilian music for over twenty years performing and/or recording with Celso Machado, Guinga, Henrique Cazes, Wagner Petrilli, Pedro Quental, Marco Tulio and Rogerio Souza among others. Duggan also performs regularly in the musical theatre scene with local Toronto and touring productions. As a session musician, Duggan has played on dozens of film and commercial soundtracks and has appeared on over 100 other recordings. He has released six CDs of his own music which have received multiple award nominations from both the Juno and East Coast Music Awards.As a composer, Duggan has created music for the Esprit Orchestra, percussion group Nexus, Soundstreams Ensemble, the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, TorQ percussion, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, Roots Orchestra, Madawaska String Quartet, Gamelan Yogistragong, clarinetist François Houle, percussionists Morris Palter, John Rudolph, Zac Pulac, and choreographers Susan Lee and Maxine Heppner. His compositions are performed at concert halls and universities around the world. Duggan is a graduate of the MFA program in percussion from the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with John Bergamo and James Newton, and holds a DMA in performance from the University of Toronto where he studied with Russell Hartenberger and Robin Engelman.
