Dr. Stephen Arthur Allen

Contact details

Professor of Music Fine Arts Rider University 2083 Lawrenceville Road Lawrenceville NJ, 08648-3099 USA
email: sallen@rider.edu
website: www.princetonbrassband.org

home: (609) 895 5504
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More about Dr. Stephen

Dr. Allen began his musical career by gaining performing and teaching diplomas in brass instrument playing and by winning national awards and television appearances as a euphonium soloist.

He graduated from the Birmingham Conservatoire with the highest B.A. academic honors degree in that institution's 100-year history. After studying composition with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Dr. Robert Simpson and conducting with Sir Simon Rattle (and his teachers, George Hurst and John Carewe), Dr. Allen went on to conduct his compositions in London (Royal Albert Hall), Los Angeles (Shrine Auditorium), Boston (Boston Gardens) and Australia (the Sydney Opera House).

A CD of his music, Across the River, was produced in 1999. His Gaudy Flourishes was commissioned by and premiered at Oxford University in 2004 and subsequently recorded to CD with a performance on radio. 2005 sees the first performances of Heroes (for concert band and brass band, written with a Rider Fellowship in Composition).

He founded The Princeton Brass Band in 2004, of which he is Musical Director. His masters and doctoral studies at Oxford University (publication forthcoming) centered on the operas of Benjamin Britten and he has been published in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and the International Journal of the Humanities (2005) and the Journal of Musicological Research (forthcoming).

Dr. Allen has tutored in music for the Queen’s and Somerville Colleges, Oxford, where he was on the ‘Official List of Recognized Teachers’. He has lectured at Oxford and at the Britten-Pears School of Advanced Musical Studies in Aldeburgh, England.

In 2003 he lectured on Britten’s music for Australian National Radio and in February 2005 he is a guest lecturer at the ‘Britten Festival’, Fredonia, NY. Dr. Allen is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, Lawrenceville.

His current research interests are the music of The Beatles, the history of pop and rock (both new courses taught at Rider) and the history of the brass band movement.

Dr. Allen is a member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) and the North American Brass Band Association (NABBA).