Andrew Shenton

Andrew Shenton was born in England. His first professional music training was at The Royal College of Music in London, where he studied under a scholarship from The Royal College of Organists. While at the RCM he read for a B.Mus. degree at London University and was an organ scholar at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Professor Shenton moved to the US to study for a Master’s degree at the Institute for Sacred Music at Yale University and then for a Ph.D. in musicology at Harvard University.

Professor Shenton has a MM in organ performance from Yale, and holds the Fellowship diploma of the Royal College of Organists. He has given recitals in such venues as King’s College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue and Washington National Cathedral. He has toured extensively in Europe and the US as a conductor, recitalist and clinician, and his two solo organ recordings have received international acclaim.

In addition to diplomas in both piano and organ Professor Shenton holds the Choir Training diploma of the Royal College of Organists. He has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards including a Harvard Merit Fellowship, Harvard’s Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, a Yale AlumniVentures Award and a Junior Research Fellowship from the BU Humanities Foundation.

Throughout his studies he has been particularly concerned with issues of historically informed performance practice. In addition, he has made an extensive study of voice production and vocal technique, and frequently acts as a repetiteur, coach and accompanist for singers. He has pioneered contemporary music in a variety of styles and has given more than forty world premieres by composers such as Geoffrey Burgon, Joe Utterback and John Tavener. His research interests include Messiaen, Pärt, jazz, the church and the arts, music and language, music and spirituality, performance practice, music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and music of the world’s religions.

Professor Shenton’s first monograph Olivier Messiaen’s System of Signs: Notes Towards Understanding His Music (Ashgate, 2008) won the 2009 Miller Book Award. He has written numerous articles, including most recently essays for collections on Messiaen published by both Ashgate and Cambridge University Press. He is editor of Messiaen the Theologian (Ashgate, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (CUP, 2011) and author of Music and Ritual in World Religions(Routledge, forthcoming, 2012).

At BU Professor Shenton directs the Master of Sacred Music program and the Boston University Messiaen Project BUMP. He also serves on the faculties of the School of Theology and CAS/GRS.