Jay Althouse

Jay Althouse received a B.S. degree in Music Education and an M.Ed. degree in Music from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he also received the Distinguished Alumni award. For eight years he served as a rights and licenses administrator for a major educational music publisher. During that time he served a term on the Executive Board of the Music Publishers Association of America.

As a composer of choral music, Jay has more than 800 works in print for choirs of all levels. His music is widely performed throughout the English-speaking world. He is a writer member of ASCAP and is a regular recipient of the ASCAP Special Award for his compositions in the area of standard music. 

Jay has co-written several children’s musicals with his wife, Sally K. Albrecht, compiled and arranged a number of highly regarded vocal solo collections such as Folk Songs for Solo Singers, and is the co-writer of the best-selling books The Complete Choral Warm-up Book and Accent on Composers. He is also the author of several reproducible books for the music classroom: Ready to Read Music, Sixty Music Quizzes, and One-Page Composer Bios. He is the co-writer, with his wife, Sally Albrecht, of I Hear America Singing, a choral work performed by the San Francisco Girls and Boys Choirs at the Inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. 

Jay resides in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where he has served on the board of the North Carolina Master Chorale. He presently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Folk Art Society of America and has written articles for the Folk Art Messenger, the society’s quarterly periodical.