About me
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Dr. Allegra Martin is the Director of Music at First Unitarian Worcester; the Music Director of Convivium Musicum, a Renaissance choir in Brookline, MA; the Chorus Director for the Pioneer Valley Symphony where she also conducts the Chamber Singers; and an Assistant Professor at the Berklee College of Music where she teaches conducting.
From 2017-2022, Dr. Martin worked as the Director of College Choirs at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; during the 2020-2021 academic year she also served as the Interim Director of the Orchestra. Previous positions have included Chorus Director at Lasell College, Director of Music at First Parish Cohasset, and Chorus Teacher with the Metropolitan Opera Guild's Urban Voices program. From 2009-2014 she served as the Artistic Director of the Cantilena Women’s Chorale in Arlington, MA and rejoined that group as their Interim Director for the Fall of 2021. Dr. Martin holds degrees from Williams College and Westminster Choir College, and a doctorate from the University of Illinois. At the University of Illinois, she founded and conducted the University Mixed Chorus.
Dr. Martin's research specialty is the choral music of Margaret Bonds, and she has presented sessions on Bonds at several state and regional ACDA conferences. She presented a research survey on the benefits of diversity in programming at the Oxford University Conducting Institute in June 2021. In January 2022 she presented at the National Collegiate Choral Organization 2022 conference on "Major Works by Black American Women." In July 2023 she presented at the annual conference of the Association for Unitarian Universalist Music Ministries with author and conductor Amelia Nagoski on preventing burnout in choral rehearsals.
Dr. Martin is also an active professional singer, and 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 currently sings with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and in the past has 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 and the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as in opera productions at the U.S. Spoleto Festival. In the summer of 2016 she performed in Britten’s War Requiem with Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.