Mark Wood grew up in Port Washington, New York, on Long Island, the son of an artist father and a concert pianist mother who shepherded her four boys into string instruments to make an all-brother string quartet, with Mark on viola. He went on to study at Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York, before beginning his career with a full scholarship at the Juilliard School in New York and studied viola under William Lincer until he left. That rigorous classical training, paired with a restless appetite for rock and roll, would define the sound he later brought to the stage as an inventor and performer of the electric violin, an instrument he helped pioneer with his own company, Wood Violins.
Wood's breakthrough came when he became the phone call I received over 30 years ago from my dear friend and brilliant guitarist, Al Pitrelli, who shared that famed rock producer Paul O'Neill was putting together a rock orchestra and wanted him to oversee the "orchestra" part of what would become the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. As the group's original string master, for over 15 years he was involved with catapulting this great band into multi-platinum status as they performed multiple concerts daily in arena sized venues for 30,000+ people. Beyond TSO, Wood built a notable session and touring resume, having played with Celine Dion, Billy Joel, Steve Vai, Westworld, and Lenny Kravitz. As a solo artist he writes and records original music for film and television, has released seven solo albums, and tours with his band The Mark Wood Experience (MWE). Wood's career arc has been marked by both commercial success and inventive ambition. His electric violin designs earned him recognition as "The Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix of the Violin World" by PBS, as the premier electric violinist of his generation who pioneered and innovated the entire genre. His broadcast composing work brought him an Emmy, since Wood received an Emmy award for the music of CBS-TVs coverage of the 2002 Tour de France. He also expanded into education, and in 2008 his method book Electrify your Strings was published, and he was elected to the board of the American String Teachers Association. Later, in 2010, he debuted the Mark Wood Rock Orchestra Camp (MWROC), where he and many other high caliber world-class rock musicians hold a full week of workshops culminating in a final concert that includes all students and faculty. Wood remains highly active today, continuing to blend performance with advocacy for music education. Alongside his wife, vocalist Laura Kaye, he runs the annual Mark Wood Rock Orchestra Camp and Festival, founded in 2010, as well as The Mark Wood Music Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to supporting music and the arts in America's underserved communities. His long running outreach program has reached hundreds of thousands of students, raised millions of dollars to help high school music departments across the US, and saved countless school orchestra programs from the chopping block. His legacy endures both as a founding architect of the symphonic rock sound that made Trans-Siberian Orchestra a household name and as a tireless champion for the next generation of string players.
For fans who followed Wood's rock orchestra during its touring years, this archive holds a special piece of that history. Wayne Dennon photographed the Mark Wood Rock Orchestra at two shows between 2007 and 2008, capturing the raw energy of a lineup that fused classical technique with arena rock showmanship. Those performances live on through 127 photographs preserved in this collection, images that have drawn 93,157 views from archive visitors reliving the electricity of those nights. As part of Wayne Dennon's broader body of concert photography dating back to 2002, these images stand as a lasting visual record of one of rock's most inventive string performers at the height of his touring years.
