Leon Shernoff is a composer and singer living in Chicago. His most recent performances include incidental music commissioned for a run of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex at the University of Chicago, an orchestra piece commissioned by the Hyde Park Youth Symphony, and singing in his own arrangement of Sari Gelin with the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago. He has also sung several of his own compositions and arrangements with The Tiny Mahler Orchestra, of which he was co-director.

You can listen to several of his performances here.

Composition

The winner of a BMI Award for Young Composers at age 16, Leon’s music has been performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Pécs Music Festival in Hungary. More recently he was commissioned to compose the music for the University of Chicago Department of Classics’ production of Oedipus The King. His composition teachers include Mel Powell, Shulamit Ran, John Eaton, Andrew Imbrie, and Morton Subotnick.

Voice

Leon was a member of Seth McCoy’s voice studio at Eastman, where he was part of the Eastman Chorale and performed in Bach’s B minor Mass at the Kennedy Center. At the University of Chicago, he ran an African ensemble for eight years teaching Anlo Ewe music. He sings in the South Asian Vocal Ensemble and Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, and is a former member of Golosá. As noted above, he has also been featured in numerous performances by the Tiny Mahler Orchestra.

In his teaching and compositions, Leon aims for a synthesis of various approaches to music-making gleaned from his study of and participation in music from a wide variety of cultures.

Fun fact

Like the composer John Cage, Leon is equally at home in music and mycology (the study of mushrooms). He is even the editor of this journal.