Allen Feinstein is a composer and conductor, and serves as Director of Music Performance in the Music Department at Northeastern University.
As a composer, Prof. Feinstein focuses on music for the concert stage, musical theatre, and film music. The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned him to write a narrated chamber work for their touring Concerts for Very Young People series, with a premiere set for summer 2025 at Tanglewood and multiple performances in the Boston area during the 2025-2026 season. Feinstein’s euphonium concerto was recorded by Adam Frey and the New Zealand Symphony and won the International Tuba Euphonium Association’s Phillips Prize for Compositional Excellence. His composition Fashion Goddess, a comic retelling of the Athena-Arachne myth written for musical theatre mezzo-soprano and band, received multiple co-premieres in 2022-23 by members of an American Composers Forum consortium.
In 2023 Feinstein conducted the 17-piece theatre orchestra and crafted a score consisting of his original compositions and arranged period photoplay music for the East Coast premiere of the recently rediscovered Oath of the Sword (1914), the oldest surviving movie created by a Japanese-American film company. He conducted and orchestrated Lois Weber’s Where Are My Children? (1916) and conducted and composed the score for D. W. Griffith’s Voice of the Violin (1909) for a DVD set produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation, which was on “ten-best” lists of Time, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Two of Feinstein’s compositions were performed at the Weill Rectial Hall at Carnegie Hall by clarinetist Marguerite Levin. Feinstein’s narrated work The Little Engine That Could has been performed by orchestras almost one hundred times across the country. During the pandemic he guided the NU Wind Ensemble through the creation of an original score to Buster Keaton’s silent classic One Week.
Feinstein’s compositions have been performed by the New Zealand Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Banda Municipal de Jaen (Spain), Virginia Symphony, US Army Orchestra, Akron Symphony, Peoria Symphony, and many other professional orchestras. The Northeastern Wind Ensemble, Concert Band and Orchestra, Harvard Wind Ensemble, University of Connecticut Wind Ensemble, Brown University Wind Symphony, and many other college ensembles have also performed his works.
Prof. Feinstein composes musicals, teaches a class on creating musical theatre, and mentors musical theatre creators, a number of whom have gone on to create musicals for Broadway, Off Broadway, and international venues. His musical At Swim Two Boys received a professional production sponsored by the Northeastern Center for the Arts. His show Aurora received an award from the New Opera Musical Theatre Initiative. Feinstein serves as Music Supervisor for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, an organization dedicated to creating a producing a new musical each year.
As a conductor Prof. Feinstein leads the Wind Ensemble and returns in 2025 to share leadership of the Northeastern University Symphony Orchestra, a group he founded and led previously for a dozen years. Conducting ensembles on campus since 1990, he has led major works for wind ensemble and orchestra, and collaborated with seven guest soloists from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted Northeastern ensembles accompanying silent films, led collaborations with the NU Choral Society, conducted many children’s concerts, and led multiple concerts built on a wide range of themes. Prof. Feinstein prioritizes working with student composers, soloists and conductors. Most programs he leads feature students in at least one of these roles.
Departments
Music
