Allen Sapp was born in Philadelphia on 10 December 1922. He was educated at Harvard University where he studied composition with Walter Piston and Irving Fine. After receiving his B.A. from that institution in 1942 (magna cum laude), Sapp studied composition and analysis privately with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger. During World War II he served as Chief Cryptanalyst and Chief of Code Research of the Civil Censorship Division, European Theater. He returned to Harvard in 1947, and received his M.A. in 1949.
From 1948 to 1958 he was Teaching Fellow, Instructor, then Assistant Professor at Harvard, and his reputation as an innovative and influential teacher of composition and musical analysis grew significantly. Several of his Harvard students from that period have developed into eminent scholars, including composer and theorist Peter Westergaard, and musicologists Howard Mayer Brown and Milos Velimirovic. Sapp moved to Wellesley College for three years (1958- 61) before being appointed Chairman of the Music Department at the University of Buffalo (later, State University of New York at Buffalo) in June of 1961. During his fourteen-year tenure at this institution (to 1975), Sapp attracted prominent musicians and scholars to the faculty at Buffalo, including the Budapest String Quartet; musicologists Frank D'Accone, Herbert Kellman, James McKinnon, Jeremy Noble and David Fuller; and renowned visiting composers including Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, George Rochberg and Henri Pousseur. He was instrumental in the hiring of Lukas Foss as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic in 1963, and together with Foss founded the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY-Buffalo, which transformed Buffalo into one of the major centers for experimental music in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1975 he accepted the offices of Provost of the Division of Communication and the Arts, and Director of Cultural Affairs, at Florida State University, but in 1978 resigned to become Dean of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He relinquished administrative responsibilities in 1980 to assume a post as Professor of Composition at Cincinnati, devoting his energies since then toward composition. The result: some 65 compositions during the past sixteen years. Sapp's orchestral works have been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, l'Orchestre de la Radiodiffusion Française, the Cincinnati Philharmonia, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Fine Arts Chamber Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic.
For more information, consult Allen Sapp: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).