Ian Schipper is a bass-baritone who explores the fullness of musical experience by performing a wide variety of art songs, oratorios, and operas.  He has featured up and down the West Coast as the Bass soloist for numerous Bach and Handel Oratorios as well as the Masses of Haydn and Mozart. He sings Bass with a number of choral groups, both on the West Coast and across the United States, including the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus, Seraphic Fire, Sterling Ensemble, Keiju Kollektiv, Long Beach Camerata singers, Catalyst Chamber Choir, San Diego Symphony Festival Chorus, Choral Arts Initiative, Pacific Chorale, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.  He also enjoys performing new compositions, having cofounded St Olaf College’s Spiritus Novus, which provides a space for student composers to have their works performed and experiment within the choral style.

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Ian has spent his summers at the Oregon Bach Festival, the Seraphic Fire Professional Choral Institute at the Aspen Summer Music Festival, the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, the Trentino Music Festival, and the Aquilon Music Festival. Recently on the operatic stage, Ian has appeared as Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Don Alfonso in Cosi Fan Tutte, Father Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Polyphemus in Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and he originated the role of Cardinal Rottweiler in Danielpour’s The Grand Hotel Tartarus. While on vacation, you may have heard Ian in Italy, Austria, Germany, England, or Norway where he sang for King Harald V (who may have fallen asleep halfway through).

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Ian earned a Masters Degree in Vocal Performance from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and a Bachelor degree in Music and Economics cum Laude at St. Olaf College, He has studied voice with Michael Dean of UCLA,  Emery Stephens, Robert C. Smith and Wilfred Williams of St. Olaf College, and Michael Meraw of the New England Conservatory. He is also an award-winning composer with Music Teachers National Association and has done research in the fields of Economics and Medical Informatics.  In his free time, Ian works with arts organizations to clean their data and optimize their information ecosystems. He has also worked with Long Beach Opera on a number of data-driven initiatives to make Opera more accessible to the public. Ian hails from Portland, Oregon, and enjoys hiking and backpacking around the Pacific Northwest.  He is also a lifelong Tolkien fan, having read The Hobbit at least 30 times, and he can frequently be found carrying a “pocket version” of the Lord of the Rings.