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NINE WINDS DISCOGRAPHY:
NWCD0204 Susan Allen/Vinny Golia - Duo
A native of Santa Barbara, California, Susan Allen is well known throughout North America, South America, Australia and Europe for her world premiere performances of new music for harp on television, radio and at major music festivals. Her appearances have included concerts on the NBC Today Show, National Public Radio (with the Vermeer String Quartet), Gaudeamus International Music Week in Rotterdam, the Festival de Caracas, the London (Ontario) Regional Art Gallery, New York Philharmonic's "Horizons" concerts, the Ferienkurse fŸr Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany, at the Kitchen Center in New York, Carnegie Recital Hall, Merkin Hall, Weill Recital Hall, the Smithsonian Institute, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Los Angeles Festival, the nationwide Festival of Korea, Monday Evening Concerts, with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Speculum Musicae, SONOR from the University of California at San Diego, and in Boston with Composers in Red Sneakers, the Pro-Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Cambridge Chamber Players, and Musica Viva. Currently Associate Dean of the California Institute of the Arts' School of Music, she is a founder/administrator of the CalArts Community Arts Partnership Chamber Music program in the Santa Clarita Valley. At the California Institute of the Arts, she appears as harpist with the CalArts New Century Players, and teaches improvisation, theory, music pedagogy, Performer/Composer forum, chamber music and harp.
Before her relocation to California in 1983, Susan founded and worked with the inception of many non- profit musical organizations in the Boston area. They include the ProArte Chamber Orchestra, Performing Artist Associates, the Cambridge Chamber Players/Marblehead Summer Music Festival, and Composers in Red Sneakers. All these organizations are vital to the musical life of Boston today. Currently, her volunteer fundraising work involves board membership and consultancy positions with Symphony in the Glen, Inc., Cantori Domino, Inc., and the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Symphony Orchestra, Inc.Susan's work in the jazz and improvisational fields have taken her as the first harpist to theVerona Italy Jazz Festival and the Stockholm Jazz and Blues All Star Festival with the trio, Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures, in many instances in collaboration with jazz great, Yusef Lateef. The group has also performed at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles with a grant from Meet the Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Program in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts. Allen has improvised alongside saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton, the late sitarist Amiya Dasgupta and trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith. She has also performed with drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath (Modern Jazz Quartet), violinist L. Shankar (WOMAD Artist), jazz great Dave Brubeck, and guitarist Kevin Eubanks (NBC Tonight Show bandleader). She is a member of the cross-cultural ensemble "Vighnesh", led by South Indian vocalist/composer Ganasaraswathy Rao, and has studied the kayagum with Korean virtuoso Ok Ja Paik.
Her recitals of works by women composers have been presented at the First and Second International Congresses on Women in Music (at New York University and the University of Southern California), Piccolo Spoleto in Charleston, S.C., the Women's Music Festival at Boston University, Op. 2 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and in 1988 at the Fifth International Congress on Women in Music in Heidelberg, Germany. Susan Allen has recorded "Concertino" for solo harp and orchestra by Germaine Tailleferre in live performance with the New England Women's Symphony under the direction of Antonia Brico. Active in the performance of music for harp and electronics, having presented one of the first recitals devoted exclusively to the medium in 1984, Susan has appeared under the auspices of the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the U.S. at New York University, at M.I.T. in Boston, at Stanford University, at the SCREAM Festival in Los Angeles, and at Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara, CA. She has premiered numerous electro-acoustic works, including "Fantasy" for harp & live electronics by Canadian composer David Myska (commissioned by the Canada Council), and a recent electro-acoustic opera "On Being Invisible II" by composer David Rosenboom. Susan's orchestral work has included positions with the American Opera Orchestra (Canary Islands, Spain), Music Academy of the West Festival Orchestra, Halifax (Nova Scotia) Symphony, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, Pasadena Symphony, Aspen Festival Orchestra, Symphony in the Glen, the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Pierre Boulez.
A 1973 graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Susan Allen received a recording grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Inc. for her solo album New Music for Harp, and was recipient of Maurice Abravanel's Award during her studies at the Music Academy of the West. Miss Allen has also received grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the USIA/RockefellerFoundation/National Endowment for the Arts. She has lectured at Harvard and Brandeis Universities, the North Carolina School for the Arts, the California Music Educators Association Conference, the University of Western Ontario, for the Minneapolis Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum), as well as at seminars in Venezuela and Germany. Susan was a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts in the spring of 1995. She has taught the harp privately since 1971, and her award-winning students have appeared as featured artists with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Glendale Symphony, the Binghamton Symphony and with Columbia Artists in New York.
Susan has recorded for Warner Brothers/Opal, Nonesuch, Vox, New Albion, Nine Winds, Meta, Black Saint/Soul Note, Galaxia, Flying Fish, Milan, and 1750 Arch Records. She performs on recent CDs with pianist/composer Harold Budd By the Dawn's Early Light (Opal/Warner Brothers), and on Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures (Flying Fish), Skyway (Black Saint/Soul Note), and The Dreamer (Meta). She is also a performer on Milan Records' CD of the soundtrack for the 1995 John Badham film Nick of Time, with music by Arthur B. Rubinstein. In July, 1996, she recorded a new work for New Albion Records by composer Sasha Matson with the Los Angeles ensemble, Just Strings. She is currently working on a solo CD of her own original music entitled Wirework. For twenty five years, she has collaborated with mezzo-soprano Kimball Wheeler in duo performances featuring works written for them by Harold Budd, William Hawley, Michael Jon Fink and others.
