Mark Popkin performed as Principal Bassoon with the New Jersey Symphony, the New York City Opera, Musica Aeterna and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. He taught a large bassoon studio at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC for 42 years.
Mark gave master classes throughout the USA as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. His wind transcriptions were published by Musica Rara, Editions Compusic, Alry Publications, and the Theodore Presser Company. The Opus Five Woodwind Quintet was awarded a 2001 Winston-Salem Arts Council Artists Projects grant to produce a CD of his transcriptions for wind quintet of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets.
Popkin also designed and produced important bassoon and contrabassoon reed making tools, now marketed by the Music Source. His book, Bassoon Reed Making, Repair and Maintenance, third edition, co-authored with Loren Glickman and published by the Instrumentalist Company, has been characterized as “the bassoonists’ bible.”