Allen Shearer, Composer

Allen Shearer has received many awards in music, including the Aaron Copland Award and residency, the Rome Prize Fellowship (Prix de Rome), a Charles Ives Scholarship, an Alfred Hertz Fellowship, four residencies at the MacDowell Colony, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one for the creation of his opera The Goddess, and grants from Meet The Composer.

Shearer has written orchestral, choral, chamber and solo music. His Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra was premiered and broadcast in Rome by the Orchestra sinfonica della RAI and has been heard in the U.S. in a chamber transcription as well as in the original orchestral version. His choral works, many of them written for the male choral ensemble Chanticleer, have been performed in nearly every state of the U.S. as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and South Africa. Among his many works for voices and instruments are King Midas, a cantata for four singers and instrumental ensemble on a poem cycle by Howard Moss; and Girolamo Cardano, Physician of Milan after the autobiography of 16 th -century mathematician and astronomer Hieronymus Cardanus. Works for voice and piano include Dreams and Wakings and Five Poems of Wallace Stevens.

Recent premieres include Bagatelles for flute and clarinet (by Earplay, September 2006), Memory Beams for violin and guitar, Outbound Passenger for mixed chamber group, and Secrets, a song cycle on poems of Linda Pastan for mezzo soprano, flute, cello and piano. In progress are Learning the Elements for mezzo soprano, clarinet and piano, and a chamber opera The Dawn Makers in collaboration with Claudia Stevens.

Allen Shearer is artistic co-director of the San Francisco new music presenter Composers, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley as well as artist diplomas from the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, and teaches at California State University, East Bay and at the University of California at Berkeley. Also a baritone, he performs vocal music old and new, including his own.