Westport Center for the Arts presents a Noontime Concert featuring Mark Lowery on percussion. Lowery is a founding member of the newEar contemporary chamber group and has been performing with orchestra and theater companies for 30 years.  The noontime concerts are free (donations accepted) and held at the Westport Presbyterian Church, 201 Westport Road, Kansas City, Mo.

Mark Lowry enjoys the variety of life as a percussionist.  As an orchestral musician, he performed for over 30 years with the Kansas City Symphony, Kansas City Ballet, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City.  He is also timpanist with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and Spire Ensemble, specializing in music of the Baroque and early Classical periods.  In the theater, he has performed with the national touring companies of “Wicked,” “The Producers,” “Motown,” “Mean Girls,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Spamalot,” “A Chorus Line,”  “Young Frankenstein,” “West Side Story,” and several others. He has also performed numerous stage shows with show business legends such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennet, Marvin Hamlisch, Wynonna Judd, The Moody Blues, etc.

As a teaching artist, his trio Tri-Percussion performs educational concerts throughout the Kansas City region and was awarded the 2009 Lighton Prize for Excellence as Teaching Artists; it was the first time in the history of the prize that a group, rather than an individual artist, had been so honored.   Lowry is active as a teacher, adjudicator, and clinician and is currently associate director of the Kansas City Youth Percussion Ensemble.  He holds the Master of Music degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Contemporary music has long been an area of keen interest for Lowry, and in 1994, he became a founding member of the contemporary chamber group newEar.  He was with the group until 2016, performing over 80 world premieres.  newEar was featured at the 20^th Annual Contemporary Music Festival (James Madison University in Virginia) and the 2007 Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, California.  In 2009 the group won the Chamber Music America/ASCAP award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music.  Their July 2011 appearance as an ensemble-in-residence at the Thailand International Music Festival was followed, in May 2012, by their performance at the Tenth Beijing Modern Music Festival in Beijing, China.