Grant Herreid

Originally a jazz and classical trumpeter in Portland, Oregon, Grant Herreid has become a versatile musician/director/teacher in the early music scene. He has toured much of the world as a singer and multi-instrumentalist on early reeds, brass, strings and voice with Hesperus, Piffaro, Early Music New York, the Newberry Consort, and My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, and he plays theorbo and lute with the baroque ensemble ARTEK and New York City Opera.  He has also been a featured guest artist with such groups as the King’s Noyse, Tapestry, the Folger Consort, Brandywine Baroque, and Apollo’s Fire.

Active as an educator and coach, he teaches classes in Renaissance music and 17th century song at Mannes College of Music in New York City, and directs the New York Continuo Collective, a 30-member group exploring the performance of 17th century continuo song.  He performs and teaches at many workshops, including Amherst Early Music Festival, Madison Early Music Festival, the Longy Medieval Institute, San Francisco Early Music Society’s Medieval/Renaissance workshop, and the Western Wind Workshops in A Capella Singing at Smith College.

Grant is a stage director and musical coach for the Seattle Academy of Opera workshop with Stephen Stubbs; recent opera work on theorbo, lute and baroque guitar includes Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse, and Aspen Music Festival’s production of Cavalli’s Eliogabalo, both conducted by Jane Glover; Handel’s Rodalinda at Portland Opera, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Yale Baroque Opera Project production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

Now teaching at Yale University, he was music director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project’s 2009 productions of Cavalli’s Giasone, and Le Tre Stagioni, a pastiche of operatic works by Handel. Now its Artistic Director, he also musically directed their 2010 American premiere of Sacrati’s La Finta Pazza.  Grant is co-director of the Yale Collegium Musicum, and he has also performed with the opera programs of Juilliard and the Curtis Institute. He has created and directed several theatrical early music shows, including a production featuring Monteverdi’s Ballo dell’Ingrate, in collaboration with Andrew Lawrence-King.  The two also collaborated on a production of La Purpura de la Rosa, the first opera performed in the New World. Other staged productions he has created include: Desperate Housewives of Shakespeare’s England: A Lute Song Cabaret; Il Caffe d’Amore (music of Luigi Rossi, Monteverdi, Merula, and others); A Day at the Faire (Elizabethan); Triomphi: Petrarch’s Triumphs Expressed in Music of the Italian Renaissance; and Guillaume de Machaut and the Fountain of Love.

Grant devotes much of his time to exploring the esoteric unwritten traditions of medieval and early Renaissance music as a founding member of the New York-based groups Ex Umbris and Ensemble Viscera, and has recorded for Archiv, Dorian, Koch, Maggie’s Music, Ex Cathedra, Lyrichord, Musical Heritage Society and Newport Classics, among others.