Allen Raymond Shearer (born October 5, 1943, in Seattle, Washington) is an American composer and baritone.
Life
Shearer’s early musical experiences were as a singer; the majority of his works are for the voice or voices, with a later emphasis on
opera. With his first wife, pianist
Barbara Shearer (1936–2005), Shearer's performances included
, some of which were his own. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in 1972, and at the
Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria where he received diplomas in concert singing and opera. He taught voice in Special Programs at the University of California at Berkeley.
Among his composition teachers were
Fred Lerdahl,
Seymour Shifrin,
Andrew Imbrie and
Max Deutsch, with whom he studied in Paris. His awards in music include the Rome Prize Fellowship, the
Aaron Copland Award, the Sylvia Goldstein Award, a
Charles Ives Scholarship, residencies at the
MacDowell Colony, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Musical style
When asked about his musical style in the discussion preceding the 2009 premiere of his opera
The Dawn Makers, Shearer answered that it varies according to the demands of the medium. Critics also describe it variously.
The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music observes that Shearer’s music, "though it recalls postwar serialism in its rhythms and textures, relies on traditional counterpoint and on tonal centers."
Its lyric quality is frequently cited: Jeff Rosenfeld, reviewing Shearer’s
Outbound Passenger, found the music "tuneful and harmonious;"
and of Shearer’s cantata
King Midas, critic
Robert Commanday wrote, ‘The singing lines are fluid and supple, animated, alive; the harmony and scoring for a quintet of instruments and percussion battery (two players), rich but delicately so."
In the British periodical
Opera, Allan Ulrich wrote that the score of Shearer’s chamber opera
The Dawn Makers has "genuine personality. The hour-long opera abounds in extended ariosos and bravura outbursts and unfurls in a conservative idiom, spiced with dissonances which neatly evade the neo-Romantic pitfalls that prevail in American opera circles."
Of the same work, Thomas Busse wrote in
San Francisco Classical Voice, "The music’s greatest strength was its singability, attributable to the composer’s being a vocalist himself. I would describe Shearer’s eclectic style as more declamatory than lyrical."
Of Shearer's opera
Middlemarch in Spring[Kosman, Joshua, "Opera Review: 'Middlemarch in Spring' is a Sunny Romp,", San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2015] Janos Gereben wrote in the
San Francisco Examiner, "Shearer's music is pleasantly dissonant, with a sound that sticks in the ears and memory. It's ambiguous music, seemingly wondering sic between keys, but landing securely each time."
[Gereben, Janos, "Middlemarch--literature's gift to opera," San Francisco Examiner, March 20, 2015]
Recent works
Opera
Instrumental works
Choral works
Vocal works
Discography
