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Scearce’s catalogue of music compositions totals nearly a thousand performances of sixty works, including seven commercial recordings on the Delos, Warner Bros, Capstone, Centaur, Albany, and Equilibrium labels.

Endymion’s Sleep, Anima Mundi, and This Thread were borne from Scearce’s association with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and its Music Director Paul Gambill.

On November 19, 2019, Scearce ceased a forty-year career as a composer with four works unproduced:

Having formally studied with composers John Eaton, Harvey Sollberger, and Donald Erb—all of whom had deep and lasting influences on his music—Scearce only developed his characteristic tonal style with the work Gaea’s Lament, written in 1989 for cellist and ethnomusicologist Jonathan Kramer, whom Scearce met fresh out of graduate school in North Carolina and whose eclectic holistic teaching highly influenced him.

He has written four operas including the full-evening Falling Angel which The Wall Street Journal has called "a noirish thriller skillfully distilled from the original—a complicated detective story laced with voodoo, Satanism and murder".

His String Quartet 1° was premiered by the Ciompi Quartet of Duke and recorded by the Fry Street Quartet. His Str Qt Nr 2 was premiered by the Borromeo Quartet at Bargemusic in Brooklyn for the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. His Third Quartet was premiered by the Penderecki Quartet on the Open Ear Festival in Toronto.

In 2010 he was awarded the Raleigh Medal of Arts for lifetime achievement.

In 2009 he received the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Music Composition, the largest single annual award in the field.

1992 — Estlin (e.e. cummings) 1993 — Field & Stream (Raymond Carver) 1995 — Bird by Bird (A.R. Ammons) 1997 — American Triptych (Jane Kenyon) 2002 — This Thread (Toni Morrison) 2004 — Str Qt Nr 2 (Hart Crane) 2009 — Bright Star (Keats) 2012 — Missa Memoriae (Catullus) 2013 — Symmetries & Asymmetries (W.H. Auden) 2014 — Falling Angel (Hjorstberg, libretto Lucy Thurber) 2015 — Keeping Things Whole (Mark Strand) 2017 — FABER (Frisch, libretto Scearce) 2019 — Orpheus Alone (String Quartet No 4)* (Mark Strand) *Last Work

Scearce received his Masters and Doctorate in Music Composition from Indiana in 1986 and 1993 respectively.

J. Mark Scearce was born in Edina, Missouri and grew up in neighboring Kirksville. There he graduated high school in 1979, and attended Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State), graduating in 1983. At NMSU he triple-majored in music theory, horn performance, and philosophy & religion.

J. Mark Scearce (born October 9, 1960) is an American composer known for his musical settings of more than 200 texts by forty poets—from art songs to operas to works for chorus and orchestra.