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Allen Shearer

Allen Shearer holds a Ph.D. in music from the University of California at Berkeley and diplomas in concert singing and opera from the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, where he studied under an Alfred Hertz Memorial Scholarship. His voice teachers in California were Edgar Jones and Amy McMurray, and in Austria, Kammersänger Ludwig Weber and Kammersänger Heinrich Pflanzl. He later studied lieder with Karl Ulrich Schnabel. He teaches also at the University of California at Berkeley where he has been a member of the voice faculty since 1980 and has also taught at San Francisco State University, San Francisco Conservatory, and the University of British Columbia.

He has been performing concert music and opera for over forty years. Also a composer, Shearer is noted for his performances of contemporary music as well as German and French art songs, oratorio, and early music. He has appeared in productions of Puccini's La Bohème, Ravel's L'Heure espagnole, and other operas, and in many oratorios including Brahms' German Requiem and the world premiere of Roger Sessions' When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.  He has made several commercial recordings including his own Five Poems of Wallace Stevens. As a composer, Allen Shearer has achieved distinction in the United States and abroad. He has been honored with a Rome Prize Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship, the Aaron Copland Award, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts. His choral works have been performed in nearly every state of the Union as well as in Europe, South Africa and the former Soviet Union, and his orchestral works have been performed by the Italian Radio Symphony (Rome) and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. His new chamber opera The Dawn Makers will be premiered in a fully staged production in San Francisco in February 2009. He co-directs the San Francisco new music presenter Composers, Inc. (www.composersinc.org) as well as Harvest of Song in Berkeley.  He is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and the American Composer's Forum, and an affiliate of Broadcast Music, Inc.

(revised 11/24/08)