Shawn Kirchner

Shawn Kirchner is a composer/arranger, singer/songwriter, and pianist active in the music circles of Los Angeles whose choral works are performed throughout the world. His appointment in 2012 as the LA Master Chorale’s Swan Family Composer in Residence was the culmination of an ongoing creative relationship with music director Grant Gershon, resulting in numerous commissions and premieres at LA’s Disney Hall. Kirchner has also collaborated with and/or written for many leading choral ensembles across the country, including Conspirare, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Lorelei Ensemble, San Diego Master Chorale, Los Robles Master Chorale, and the Atlanta Master Chorale.

Kirchner’s choral writing is informed by his interest in songwriting and folk/carol traditions on the one hand, and poetry on the other.  Best-known worldwide for his setting of the Kenyan song Wana Baraka and other settings of traditional American songs, which have been praised by the LA Times as “arranged with mastery,” Kirchner has also produced cycles on the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Blake.  His original songwriting ranges in style from jazz and gospel to folk and bluegrass, the latter featured on his CD Meet Me on the Mountain.

As a singer with the LA Master Chorale, Kirchner has performed with the LA Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl in many collaborations with the world’s leading conductors, composers, and soloists, and he has sung on recordings of the music of Adams, Reich, Glass, Lang, Gorecki, and Muhly.  In 2016, he sang in LAMC’s ground-breaking performance of the fully-staged Renaissance masterpiece, Lagrime di San Pietro by Orlando di Lasso, as conceived and directed by Peter Sellars – a production now set to tour internationally through 2020.  Kirchner has also sung on the soundtracks of three dozen feature films including Avatar, La La Land, Sing!, Ghostbusters, Minions, Jumanji, the Lorax, and the X-Men series.

Kirchner was raised with his triplet brother and sister in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where his musicianship was shaped through intensive piano study with Joan Smalley and George Katz. His principal creative mentors are the poet/songwriter Steve Kinzie and choral composer/arranger Alice Parker. He earned a BA in Peace Studies from Manchester University and a MA in Choral Conducting from the University of Iowa where his teachers included William Hatcher, Richard Bloesch, and Donald Jenni.

“Everything he touches turns to musical gold.” — Grant Gershon (BroadwayWorld 2/17/15)