According to the, no doubt, apocryphal story, Alan Sherrod was born in Toronto, Canada in 1955 to Alsatian/German parents. At the age of four, he was accidentally abandoned in an industrial sand and gravel yard by his mother who had gone there, supposedly, to obtain materials for a sand box. Some years later, he was discovered in the LP listening booth of the public library in Buffalo, New York, listening to side ten of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Asked why he had been missing for so long, he replied: “well…it’s a long opera.”
Alan Sherrod has been the Classical Music and New Music critic for the alternative weekly newspaper Metro Pulse since 2007 and is an occasional contributor to other music publications including the Nashville Scene.
He was the recent recipient of a 2010 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts — the Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera — under the auspices of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
