Susan Allen

Susan Allen (May 10, 1951 – September 7, 2015) was an American harpist and Associate Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts. Of her solo concert debut featuring new works, The New York Times wrote, “sheer physical virtuosity…sensitive, expertly played.”

She spent her early years in Santa Barbara, California, graduating from Santa Barbara High School in 1969. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and then transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, receiving a BFA in 1973. She obtained an MA and PhD from Schools on Borders in 2006.

She commissioned, premiered, recorded and performed numerous works for harp by James Tenney, Ruth Lomon, Earl Kim, William Thomas McKinley and other artists. As a jazz artist, she is known for free improvisation as well as work in world music genres, having appeared internationally with such artists as Swapan Chaudhuri, Yusef Lateef, L. Subramaniam, Adam Rudolph, Ed Sarath and Roman Stolyar. She 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 improvised alongside saxophonist Anthony Braxton, sitarist Amiya Dasgupta and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. She also performed with drummer Albert Heath, violinist L. Shankar, as well as Dave Brubeck.

Allen died on September 7, 2015 of a metastatic cancer.

Early life

Allen was the second of five children born to Dorothy (née Wheeler) and George H. Allen, a pianist and lawyer. Her first studies of the harp were with Suzanne Balderston, whose husband, composer Mahlon Balderston, was organist at the First Unitarian Church in Santa Barbara, where Allen’s mother Dorothy was choir director. She studied at the Music Academy of the West with Leon Fleisher for chamber music and Maurice Abravanel for orchestra, winning the Abravanel Award for Outstanding Achievement in 1971. Subsequent harp studies were with Bernard Zighera, principal harpist of the Boston Symphony, Marcel Grandjany, Catherine Gotthoffer and Marcella DeCray. Her primary mentor and lifelong associate was the jazz pianist Mel Powell, who was founding Dean of the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts.

Concerts and recordings

After her graduation from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973, she relocated to Boston, MA, where she helped found the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, Cambridge Chamber Players, Marblehead Music Festival, and Composers in Red Sneakers.

In 1976, she traveled to the Netherlands and performed as solo recitalist at the International Harpweek in Kerkrade (now the World Harp Congress), continuing on to Amsterdam to premiere “Ventilation Manual” by Burr van Nostrand for flute and harp at the Gaudeamus International Composers Competition. In the same year, she was soloist on NBC's Today program with musicians from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. She recorded “Concertino” by Germaine Tailleferre with the New England Women’s Symphony in live performance conducted by Antonia Brico in 1979.

Her first solo recording, New Music for Harp, was funded by the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music in New York. It was recorded at John Knowles Paine Hall at Harvard University in 1981 for Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch Records label. She participated as a performer in music written by Earl Kim for one of the first Musicians Against Nuclear Arms concerts at Lincoln Center in New York in 1981, which featured astronomer Carl Sagan as speaker.

In 1983 she relocated to Los Angeles, where she joined the Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. She worked in recording studios doing television and film scores with, among others, Arthur B. Rubinstein who composed the scores for Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Nick of Time, Lost in America, and WarGames. Together with Rubinstein, she helped found Symphony in the Glen in Los Angeles.

In 1989 she performed a solo recital of new works at the International Darmstädter Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1991 she recorded an album with her former teacher Harold Budd By the Dawn’s Early Light for Opal/Warner Brothers at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway Music Studio in New Orleans. Budd’s earlier compositions for harp, Madrigals of the Rose Angel, Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord and Butterfly Sunday, were premiered by Allen.

In 1998 she premiered and recorded Mel Powell's last composition Seven Miniatures with Norwegian vocalist Anne-Lise Berntsen. She also traveled to India, in concert tour with L. Subramaniam, Larry Coryell, Miya Masaoka, and Kumar Bose. Their concerts were broadcast on All-India Television in celebration of the country’s 50th year of independence.

In 2005 she joined the group Ephemera: capturing the moving mind on their conference trip across Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. There, she met the pianist Roman Stolyar from Novosibirsk with whom she has performed and recorded internationally.

She performed at the Chilli Jazz Festival in Austria, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Ojai Music Festival and Walt Disney Concert Hall, both with Pierre Boulez, and REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Other work

Susan Allen was Faculty advisor to the CalArts Community Arts Partnership for 20 years. Allen wrote extensively on distance education and social media, including book chapters and papers in collaboration with Malcolm McAfee, Leah Irving of Curtin University, and Ken Eustace of Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Allen was published in the journal Parabola, having written numerous papers on improvisation, consequently presented at the International Bertolt Brecht Symposium, the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space and Place, and the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies.

She taught and lectured on harp and improvisation at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, the Moscow Conservatory, the International Association for Jazz Education, the Juilliard School and the College of Music in Novosibirsk, Russia, among others. Allen held an annual summer course in Pacific Palisades, California (but also held internationally) for harpists.

Allen also played the Korean Gayageum which she studied with Ok Ja Paik and Hiza Yoo. Her harp students included Mia Theodoratus and Phala Tracy.

Discography

• 1979 - Concertino for harp & orchestra by Germaine Tailleferre - Galaxia Records
• 1981 - New Music for Harp - 1750 Arch Records
• 1984 - The Art of Joan LaBarbara - Nonesuch Records
• 1991 - By the Dawn's Early Light - Opal/Warner Brothers
• 1992 - Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures - Black Saint/Soul Note
• 1994 – Skyway - Black Saint/Soul Note
• 1995 - The Dreamer – Meta
• 1998 - Duets - Nine Winds
• 2001 - Mel Powell: Five Decades of Music - Nine Winds
• 2004 – Ligatures – Tilleria
• 2006 - Trialog – Ermatell
• 2007 – Renaissance
• 2010 - On the Steps
• 2011 – Together Tilleria
• 2012 - The Dream Gallery: Seven California Portraits – Naxos
• 2014 - Saturn's Rival - pfMENTUM