About
Alison Wahl is a musician whose work as a singer, composer, and songwriter spans many musical worlds and seeks to center authentic human presence. Her music invites performers and audiences to bring their whole true selves to the process of sharing art together, and to value their own perspectives with tenderness and pride. It is her hope that her music makes people feel connected, helping to heal feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Equally passionate about performing, songwriting, teaching, and composing, Alison is constantly generating new projects. Currently she is interested in setting more poems by Wallace Stevens, who is her favorite poet, and whose works have recently entered public domain. She approaches each setting with a different perspective and musical language that fits the poetry, including traditional art songs with piano and voice, lilting singer-songwriter melodies with string accompaniment, and electronic paradigms of distortion. She hopes her collection of songs will serve as a solid gateway for singers who are branching out into experimental styles and extended techniques.
Alison’s music is frank, curious, and playful. As a singer-songwriter she has released three albums and has two more currently in production. She is sought after as a studio collaborator, and is a skilled improvisor of harmonies. Her newest EP, “Songs of Change,” was released in September of 2022. Alison’s folk repertoire includes songs for vocals and guitar, piano, harp, mandolin, banjo, and ukulele, combining surprising harmonies and complicated fingerpicking patterns with coy, imaginative lyrics. Her songs exhibit a wide range of styles and forms and can be catchy and cheerfully folky, or experimental and expressively strange. For her, songwriting is a tangible way to process and understand kernels of human emotion and experience, especially the relationships between people and their environments. Alison’s music is earnestly human, stubbornly optimistic, intricate, and thoughtful.
Equally at home on the operatic and oratorio stage, Alison was praised by the Chicago Tribune for her “appealing,” “bright, vibrant soprano.” She appeared as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, the Northwest Indiana Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music series, the Chicago Arts Orchestra, and the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago. She created the roles of Clori in Haymarket Opera’s Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno and Pernille in VOX3’s Maskarade, and appeared as Pamina in Opera for the Young’s The Magic Flute.
Alison was a regular member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the Grant Park Chorus, and Music of the Baroque. She was a 2015 vocal fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and a 2012 young artist at the Steans Music Institute at the Ravinia Festival. She was the second-place winner of the 2013 University of Madison Early Music Festival’s Handel Aria Competition and received an Encouragement Award at the 2012 Met National Compeition.
Alison has taught Voice, Composition, Theory, and Aural Skills at Judson University and Ithaca College. She graduated with highest honors from Amherst College, winning the Eric Edward Sundquist Prize and the Consulate General Prize for Excellence in Music Composition and Performance. A recipient of the Edward Poole Lay Fellowship, she holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts and a Masters degree with honors in Voice Performance and Literature from Northwestern University, where she was awarded the Eckstein Scholarship. She was the first graduate of the Peabody Conservatory's Low-Residency Masters program, where she studied composition with Sky Macklay.