Glen Shannon Music

about GSM

Glen Shannon Music was founded in 1998 when the Prelude & Fugue in D Minor for SSATB recorders, now published as SMM100, won first prize in 1997 in the biennial composition contest sponsored by the Chicago Chapter of the American Recorder Society. The main focus is publishing music for recorder ensembles, but that could change at any moment. One of the basic rules of my music is that all parts are interesting - after spending years in high school and college concert bands, I learned that it's boring playing all whole-notes on the contrabass clarinet, or in the third clarinet section. So I like to keep everyone interested. The Prelude & Fugue is an excellent example of that philosophy.

About Glen Shannon
I grew up near Buffalo, NY, the middle kid of five. My older brother and sister are also musicians - my sister Tammy is an excellent guitarist and songwriter playing since she was seven, about the same time my brother Sean got his first drumset. Now he is a professional drummer and owns sound recording studios outside Orlando, where he also teaches audio engineering and mixing courses. My next younger sister Erin owns a farm brewery with her husband in Upstate New York, and the youngest sister, Meghan, is a veterinarian in Colorado and owns her own veterinary clinic.

My musical training consists of spending my teen years learning volumes of JS Bach's work by heart, and a couple theory classes while an undergrad at Cornell University (class of '88!). Bach's preludes, fantasias, toccatas and fugues for organ were my particular favorites and at age twelve I started writing music which emulated his style. Of course it wasn't great, but it was the start of a lifelong passion. Since then I've refined my own style of composing - now that I know some of the rules, I like to break them.

In addition to composing music I am also involved with the East Bay Recorder Society, where I was the President for three years 1999-2001, and now I'm the keeper of the chapter music library, which is a free-for-all music exchange (for published editions only). I also heckle at chapter meetings and occasionally am their hired conductor.

I have a regular day job at a small graphics company in San Francisco called TransPacific Digital, which specializes in digital prepress, graphics and web design in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Usually the multilingual projects come to me; in addition to the "standard" languages that come through, recently I've done some fun projects in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Kazakh. With enough reference material I have been known to translate complicated Hindi names into Simplified Chinese for business cards.

The first time I encountered a recorder was in third grade, when everyone learned it. The school used it as a litmus test of musical aptitude, which then helped determine who would be in the school band the next year. I took to it easily and joined the band the next year on clarinet, which I chose to play because of its extended range. It wasn't until years later that I learned there were any other sizes of recorder besides the soprano! When I was 10 I discovered that you could play all the chromatic notes by cross-fingerings and my head exploded. WOW!!! That was the greatest thing ever!