W. A. Mathieu

Who is W. A. Mathieu?

William Allaudin Mathieu is a composer, pianist, choir director, music teacher, and author. He studied with William Russo and Easley Blackwood, with North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath for 25 years, and collaborated with Nubian master musician Hamza El Din.

In the 1960s, he spent several years as an arranger and composer for Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington orchestras. Kenton's album Standards In Silhouette consists entirely of Mathieu's arrangements and revealed the young Mathieu to be an incredibly adept manipulator of compositional materials.

Mathieu was one of the founders and the musical director for the Second City in Chicago, the first on-going improvisational theater troupe in the United States, and was later the musical director for the Committee, an improv theater in San Francisco that was an off-shoot of the Second City. In the 1970s, he was on faculties of San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Mills College. Allaudin was the original director of the Sufi Choir founded in 1969 in San Francisco among followers of Samuel L. Lewis.

Mathieu began recording solo piano albums in 1980, and has composed a large variety of chamber pieces, choral works, and song cycles.