Allegra Martin

Music Department
 

Director, College Choirs 
MM, Westminster Choir College
DMA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Fields: Choral Music, Renaissance Music, 20th-century American Music, Women's Choirs

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Email:  amartin@holycross.edu
Office Phone508 793-2430
Office: Fenwick 446A
PO Box

 

Dr. Allegra Martin is the Director of College Choirs at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where she directs the College Choir and the Chamber Singers and teaches Fundamentals of Music Theory. Previously, she was the choral director at Lasell College in Newton, MA. She has held a variety of conducting and teaching positions throughout the greater Boston area, including Artistic Director of Cantilena in Arlington, MA; Director of Music at First Parish in Cohasset, MA; and Choral Artist with Urban Voices through the Metropolitan Opera Guild, a program that partners with schools lacking music programs to provide choral training.

Dr. Martin earned her DMA in Choral Music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focused on the cantatas of Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes. At the University of Illinois, she founded and conducted the University Mixed Chorus. She earned her Masters in Choral Conducting from Westminster Choir College, and her BA in Physics and Music from Williams College. Past teachers have included Andrew Megill, Sun Min Lee, Andrea Solya, and Joseph Flummerfelt.

Dr. Martin's primary area of research is African-American choral music. She has presented at multiple conferences on the works of Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes. Other areas of interest include Renaissance choral music, 20th-century American music, women's chorus repertoire, and new music.

She is also an active professional singer, and currently sings with Schola Cantorum of Boston and Diamonds from the Dust in Worcester. She was one of the founders of Anthology, a women's vocal quartet that performed in the greater Boston area for six years and commissioned 22 works of new music in that time. She has also sung with such ensembles as Cappella Clausura and the Video Game Orchestra. While at the University of Illinois, she performed Julia Wolfe's award-winning Anthracite Fields with Bang on a Can and Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans with the Venice Baroque Orchestra. While at Westminster, she sang with the New York Philharmonic, the Dresden Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as in opera productions at the U.S. Spoleto Festival. In the summer of 2016 she performed Britten's War Requiem with Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony.