About Alan Hirsh

Well known as composer/arranger/guitarist/and music educator, Alan Hirsh currently resides in North Carolina where he served for 25 years as Music Director and Fine Arts Department Chair at Bishop McGuinness High School as well as adjunct guitar instructor at Wake Forest University.  Alan is also the founder of the Piedmont Guitar Orchestra and actively directs festival guitar orchestras around the country, including at the Appalachian Guitarfest, the Greensboro Guitarganza, the Long Island Guitar Festival, the Virginia Music Educators Association and the Shearer Summer Institute.

Alan serves as Executive Director and Vice President of Education of the Aaron Shearer Foundation. He began a collaboration with world-renown pedagogue, Aaron Shearer back in the 1980’s, composing music for the  ground-breaking 1988 three-volume method series: Learning the Classic Guitar published with Mel Bay.   He since continued his collaboration with Aaron (until his passing in 2008) as composer and editor of the three-volume Alfred Music publications:  The Shearer Method, a work representing Shearer’s lifetime culmination of thought on how the guitar should be taught.

He remains active as a composer, having written and arranged extensively for orchestra, band, chorus, guitar and guitar ensemble.   Alan’s many published works include Mel Bay publications of Twenty Etudes in fixed Positions  and New Music for Classic Guitar, Trio Concertino, Holiday, Folk, Sacred, and Renaissance Collections for guitar ensemble.

For more information on Alan Hirsh and his high school guitar program see the NAfME article, Guitar Class in the Tar Heel State