Allen Shearer
Voice, Composition, Opera Workshop director
Office: MB2110
Telephone: (510) 885-3888
Email: allenshearer@earthlink.net
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.
Shearer has been teaching at the university level since 1968. He has been a member of the voice faculty at the University of California at Berkeley since 1980, and has taught at San Francisco State University, San Francisco Conservatory, and the University of British Columbia. He has taught composition, orchestration, counterpoint, harmony, 20th-Century music, musicianship, and music appreciation as well as voice. He has maintained a private voice studio since 1964.
He has been performing concert music and opera for over forty years, and is noted for his performances of contemporary music as well as German and French art songs, oratorio, and early music. Notable contemporary performances include the world premieres of Roger Sessions' cantata When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and Fred Lerdahl's Aftermath, and the West Coast premieres of Seymour Shifrin's Chronicles, Claudio Spies's Sieben Enzensberger-Lieder, Charles Wuorinen's Psalm 47, and Sheila Silver's Canto. His many performances with orchestra include Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, Brahms' German Requiem, and Bartók's Cantata Profana. Early repertoire includes Monteverdi's Partenza amorosa and Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. He has appeared in productions of Puccini’s La Bohème and Gianni Schicchi, Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole, and other operas. 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, and grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts and affiliated institutions, and residenceis at the MacDowell Colony, and the Aaron Copland Award. 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. 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 an affiliate of Broadcast Music, Inc.
(revised 9/20/05)
