Mark Willey

I fell for sound in a church in Paris. I was sixteen, on a free afternoon during a choir tour, and I spent it darting into churches just long enough to turn around and stare up at the pipe organs in the loft. At Notre-Dame I bought a cassette, Louis Vierne's organ symphonies, played by Pierre Cochereau, and listened to it that night as the bus tore through the dark. That music, at once medieval and modern, primal and precise, is still a core memory. It's why I became an organist.

The organ taught me the thing I now build a career on: sound is inseparable from the room it happens in. No instrument leans on its space the way the organ does, but once you've heard it that way, you hear it everywhere. The interaction of instrument, voice, and room is present in every recording I make, and my whole job is to listen for it and honor it.

I started recording in 1993 with a portable DAT machine, mostly to capture music for myself. In 2007 I edited my first professional album, and it became a career. Since then I've been the engineer, editor, and increasingly the filmmaker for ensembles I once only dreamed of hearing up close: Washington National Cathedral, the Basilica of the National Shrine, the Washington Bach Consort, Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, the Eastman School of Music, the Smithsonian, the Annapolis Opera.

One piece has followed me my whole life. As a sophomore at the Peabody Conservatory, my teacher Ray Sprenkle introduced me to Bach's Mass in B minor. Sitting in that classroom, it never crossed my mind that I'd one day be hired to record it, let alone more than once. Bach's music is aboard the Voyager probes right now, carried past the planets as humanity's ambassador to the stars, and that is roughly the reverence the piece deserves. This past spring, with Dana Marsh conducting the Washington Bach Consort, I made the recording I'm proudest of. It is, to my ear, perfect music, and the performance rose to meet it. Years of learning exactly where to place a microphone came down to one goal: to capture as much of that living experience as a recording can hold.

If music is one axis of my life, the bicycle is the other. I raced mountain bikes as a kid, including the Mammoth Kamikaze Downhill at fourteen, when the sport was brand new, and I've never really gotten off. A bike is my commute, my escape, my outdoor sanctuary; I ride to recording sessions, and once sprinted through DC traffic, twice, to fetch a piece of gear a gig couldn't live without. Bach and bicycles: the two things that have shaped me most, and the reason my work goes by that name.

That same instinct (listen, find the shape, get out of the way) eventually pulled me toward film, as far as Niger, where I made a short documentary for a non-profit that has since helped fund its work. People sometimes ask whether the classical recording and the documentary belong to the same person. They do. Underneath both is one craft: listening closely to a room, a voice, a story, and shaping what I hear so that other people feel it too. Bach taught me that structure and emotion are the same thing. I've been proving it ever since, in a cathedral, at a mixing desk, and on the open road.