Roger Marsh attended the University of York in the early seventies, where he studied with Bernard Rands. He spent two years (1976-78) at the University of California, San Diego, on a Harkness Fellowship. From 1978 to 1988 he lectured at the University of Keele and was Head of Department there for three years before returning to York, where he is currently Professor of Music.
His music has been performed and broadcast widely. A work for piano and orchestra, Stepping Out, was premiered during the BBC Proms 1990 season. Espace, for orchestra, was premiered at the Huddersfield Festival in 1994. A work for percussion quartet, Sukeroku (2000), composed for ‘Backbeat Percussion’, has been extensively toured by them and was recorded in Japan along with a work for O-Tsuzumi and Percussion quartet, Atsumari (2004) (CD: NF61801). His setting of all of Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire - 50 Rondels Bergamasques was released in 2007 on NMC records (NMC127), and a major article on Giraud was published in Twentieth-Century Music (CUP) also in 2007. Il Cor Tristo, an extended work for the Hilliard Ensemble which sets two cantos from Dante’s Inferno, was premiered in Perugia, Italy, in September 2008.
Marsh's vocal music includes Lullaby, composed for the NMC Songbook in 2009, and A Lyke Wake Dirge for chamber choir, premiered by The 24 in China in 2010. In 2013, Marsh composed Poor Yorick for the Hilliard Ensemble’s 40th Anniversary Tour which piece received its world premiere in London at the Spitalfields Winter Festival in December 2013, with subsequent performances in Paris and Munich. Marsh directs the music theatre ensemble Black Hair, which gave the world premiere in 2010 of Rising, a sequence of musical and theatrical actions devised in collaboration with Black Hair. Marsh is also known for his abridgements and productions of all the novels of James Joyce for Naxos Audiobooks, including Joyce’s Ulysses - unabridged on 22 CDs (2004). In 2010 he composed music for a major BBC Radio 3 production of Goethe’s Faust.
