Allyn Ferguson

Board of Directors

Allyn Ferguson has established himself as one of America's foremost men of music. Equally at home composing award-winning scores for film and television, arranging for jazz and big band records and conducting for symphony orchestra, he has had a long and illustrious career that is testimony to his mastery of both the classical and jazz idioms.

Ferguson's musical training began at the age of four with trumpet lessons from the father of the legendary jazz musician Red Nichols. At seven he began serious study of the piano and was concertizing at twelve. About that time, he began to be interested in writing and playing jazz, which eventually led to associations with Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Freddie Hubbard, Ella Fitzgerald and many other jazz greats.

He studied with Nadia Boulanger in France and with Ernst Toch and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, where his piano concerto won a scholarship award. He obtained BA and MA degrees in music and composition from San Jose State University, after which he taught composition and piano at Stanford University while pursuing a PhD Degree. While at Stanford, Allyn formed the noted Chamber Jazz Sextet and became very active in the experimental Poetry-and-Jazz movement. He then moved from Stanford to Los Angeles where he emersed himself in all phases of the music industry, from recordings to live performances to television and motion picture scores. At that time, Allyn began writing, arranging and conducting for the Academy Awards, the Grammy awards and the Emmy Awards.

Ferguson has conducted symphony orchestras extensively, both here and abroad, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, The New London Symphony, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The San Jose Symphony Orchestra, The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, The Vienna Symphony Orchestra, The Glendale Symphony Orchestra, and The Bohemian Club Symphony Orchestra, where he is a resident conductor.

Ferguson has also written a significant body of original work for symphony and chamber orchestras, including Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Statements for Orchestra, Mood Swings Suite for String Orchestra, Three Movements for Tenor Sax and Orchestra, Pentavelance, a chamber orchestra piece commissioned for the 1984 Olympics, Love You Madly, a medley of Ellington songs orchestrated for the L.A. Philharmonic and I Remember, a five-movement suite for alto saxophone, double bass and orchestra embodying Ferguson's impressions of Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Bob Cooper and Charlie Parker.

Ferguson has written over seventy-five movie scores, many of which have won or been nominated for awards. Some of his more memorable ones include The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Four Feathers, All Quiet on the Western Front, Les Miserables (Emmy nomination), Camille (Emmy nomination), The Corsican Brothers, Romance on the Orient Express, The Last Days of Patton (Emmy nomination), April Morning (Emmy nomination) and Pancho Barnes (Emmy nomination).

Allyn Ferguson sits on the executive board of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and serves on the Asmac Board of Directors.