Andrew Clark

Andrew Clark is the Director of Choral Activities and Senior Lecturer on Music at Harvard University. He serves as the Music Director and Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, the Harvard Summer Chorus, and teaches courses in conducting, choral literature, and music and disability studies in the Department of Music.

Clark’s work with the Harvard Choral Program empowers individuals and communities through active engagement with choral music: fostering compassion, community-building, and joy. As an artist-educator devoted to advancing equity, justice, and access to the arts, Clark has developed community partnerships with youth music education programs, correctional institutions, health care facilities, overnight shelters, senior-care communities, and other service organizations operating beyond the normalized conventions of arts practice. Clark has organized Harvard residencies with distinguished conductors, composers, and ensembles, including Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Lorelei and Antioch ensembles, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Maria Guinand, Harry Christophers, Craig Hella Johnson, and Maasaki Suzuki, among others.

Since arriving at Harvard in 2010, Dr. Clark has led the Harvard Choruses in performances at the Kennedy Center, Boston Symphony Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and venues across the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America. His performances of choral-orchestral works with the Harvard Choruses have received critical acclaim, including Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Mass in B-Minor, Handel’s Messiah, Esther, and Israel in Egypt, the Mozart Requiem, Haydn’s Creation and Lord Nelson Mass, Beethoven’s Mass in C and Ninth Symphony, the Dvorak Stabat Mater, the All-Night Vigil of Rachmaninoff, the Poulenc Gloria, and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. He has also led the Harvard Choruses in presenting seminal 20th- and 21st-century works by Arthur Honegger, Lukas Foss, Ross Lee Finney, John Corigliano, Arvo Pärt, Tigran Mansurian, Jonathan Dove, David Lang, and Trevor Weston. Clark has commissioned and premiered over fifty compositions and recently launched the Harvard Choruses New Music Initiative, supporting the creative work of undergraduate composers. His choirs have been hailed as “first rate” (Boston Globe), “cohesive and exciting” (Opera News), and “beautifully blended” (Providence Journal), achieving performances of “passion, conviction, adrenalin, [and] coherence” (Worcester Telegram). He has collaborated with the National Symphony, the Pittsburgh and New Haven Symphonies, the Boston Pops, the Handel and Haydn Society, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, the Boston Philharmonic, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Trinity Wall Street Choir, the Washington Chorus, Stephen Sondheim, Ben Folds, and the late Dave Brubeck, among others.

Prior to his appointment at Harvard, Clark was Artistic Director of the Providence Singers and served as Director of Choral Activities at Tufts University. Clark continues his work as a founding faculty member of the Notes from the Heart music program near Pittsburgh, a summer camp for children and young adults experiencing disabilities and chronic illness. He earned degrees from Wake Forest, Carnegie Mellon, and Boston Universities, studying with Ann Howard Jones, David Hoose, and the late Robert Page. He lives in Medford, MA, with his wife, Amy, and their daughters, Amelia and Eliza.