Description:

A native of Santa Barbara, California, Susan Allen is well known throughout the world for her world premiere performances of new music for harp on television, radio and at major music festivals. Long-term collaborations with composers James Tenney, Earl Kim, Mel Powell, Harold Budd, Ruth Lomon, Morton Feldman, William Thomas McKinley and many others have yielded her premieres and recordings of major 20th century repertoire for harp.Since 1988 she has been Associate Dean of the California Institute of the Arts' School of Music and 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 ensemble, theory, music pedagogy, Performer/Composer forum, chamber music and harp.