the new album
from composer & violinist Mark Zaki
with Mara Zaki, mezzo
Composers Concordance Records
Streaming February 6, 2026 on all major platforms
I reached out with hands full of air
I leaned in your presence
but you stood in your own distance
and didn’t see the child in my chest
holding out an invisible flower
Contact us for more information, or if you’d like to receive a physical CD or high definition files for review/broadcast.
Written, performed, and produced by Mark Zaki
© 2026 Mark Zaki and MeanTone Music (BMI)
All Rights Reserved
Across eight tracks, Mark Zaki crafts a collection that is both sonically adventurous and emotionally resonant. While grounded in contemporary classical traditions, the album seamlessly integrates influences from electronica, computer music, jazz, and historically informed performance practice. The result is a kaleidoscopic soundworld where genres dissolve into one another, creating a listening experience that is at times, as playful and whimsical as it is reflective and poignant.
At the heart of The Turning Frame lies Zaki’s exploration of memory, identity, and commentary on the present moment. The track Hands Full of Air, featuring mezzo Mara Zaki, poignantly portrays the voice of a child navigating the delicate terrain between the desire for acceptance and the fears that guard it.
“With The Turning Frame, I wanted to create an album that lives at the intersection of memory, imagination, and commentary. Each piece traces a line between the intimate and the outward-looking, touching moments of nostalgia, fragility, and wonder, and bound together by an enduring impulse to explore. The music draws on the many traditions I’ve lived with as a performer and composer: contemporary classical, jazz, early music, electronica, and computer music. In weaving them together, my goal was to build a soundworld that feels at once familiar and surprising, rooted and yet untethered.”
~ Mark Zaki
“There was a poetic ease in which video, acoustic, and electronic elements melded together. Zaki himself provided abstract commentary with live solo violin, plus atmospheric electronic underbrush - all used with great emotional imperative, exploring the alienation technology has brought into our lives.”
~ David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer
Mark Zaki is a composer and violinist who thrives at the intersection of contemporary classical music and technology, often with surprising and compelling results. One project may be a historically informed string quartet; the next, an electroacoustic performance with live video that questions how we see (and hear) ourselves in a digital world.
A Fulbright Scholar and Mellon Fellow, his work has appeared at the NY Philharmonic Biennial, National Sawdust, SEAMUS, the NYC and Boston Visual Music Marathons, and international festivals from Seoul to Havana. His music can be found on New Focus, Composers Concordance, SEAMUS Records, and his own ZAKI Intermedia label.
Zaki has also scored more than 50 film and media projects, ranging from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum - featured The Eyes of Van Gogh to the Peabody-nominated PBS film The Political Dr. Seuss.
He divides his time between Princeton and New York City.
Mezzo-soprano Mara Zaki is a recent Bard College graduate, where she double-majored in Music and Literature, a combination that shaped both her artistry and her approach to storytelling.
She began her vocal training with Ilka LoMonaco and continued with Rufus Müller, picking up an eclectic lineup of operatic roles along the way. At Bard, she took the stage as Dorabella (Così fan tutte), Hänsel (Hänsel und Gretel), Marthe (Faust), Leonora (La Favorita), and the ever-mischievous Mistress Quickly (Falstaff).
Outside of Bard, Mara has performed with the Clarion Society’s Collegium Week, the baroque band La Fiocco, and the Hudson River Consort. Recent highlights include stepping into the heartbreak of Dido (Dido and Aeneas) for the Queens College Baroque Opera Workshop, and appearances with the Bach Academy at Northwestern University as a Young Artist in 2024 and 2025.
Composers Concordance Records Directors: Gene Pritsker, Shanan Estreicher
Associate directors: Peter Jarvis, Dan Cooper
Composers Concordance Records presents thematically-related recordings of modern music produced with the latest developments in studio precision. CCR is developing new concepts of what an album can be, bringing new music and new mediums together to a new level of cross-genre transcendence.
Our goal is simple...
good music recorded well, pushing the boundaries of sound and composition.
https://www.composersconcordance.com/compcordrec