American lyric tenor Paul Sperry, Director of Joy In Singing since 1987, is that rarity in today's musical world: a singer dedicated to preserving the song recital. Though his experience in opera extends from Monteverdi through Stockhausen, he continues to devote much of his time to the programming and performance of songs from every country and every period of music. Born in Chicago, Mr. Sperry started piano lessons at age five, graduated from Harvard College and continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked extensively with such masters of art-song interpretation as Pierre Bernac, Jennie Tourel and Paul Ulanowsky and studied acting with Stella Adler. This combination of liberal arts education, supreme musicianship and dramatic flair contribute to what The New York Times called "one of today's leading song recitalists." Sperry's extraordinarily wide repertory includes songs, chamber works and oratorios in fifteen languages, and includes more than fifty works that have been written for him by many of today's leading composers both European and American -among them Beaser, Bolcom, Cipullo, Druckman, Hagen, Hundley, Larsen, Paulus, Rands, Talma, Henze, Stockhausen, and Maderna. Among his recordings are four CDs of American songs for Albany Records, Bernard Rands "Canti del Sole" which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for CRI, and the complete songs of Ives which he recorded with three other singers for Albany Records. Most recently Zephyr Records has issued a CD of Poulenc songs with pianist Ian Hobson, and their CD entitled "Great Composers Love Folksongs Too" will be available soon. Their recording of Schubert's "Winterreise" should be released late in 2001. He has edited numerous collections of American songs for G. Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes, Peer-Southern and Dover Publications and is preparing a book of American Encores for the Oxford University Press. Today Mr. Sperry is widely appreciated for his own master classes at the Eastman School of Music, the Peabody Institute, Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Southern California, Harvard and Yale to name a few. Since 1984 he has taught 19th- and 20th-century song repertory and performance at the Juilliard School, and he has created there what may be the country's only full-year course in American song. He also teaches courses in American song at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He has been a faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival since 1978, founded the Vocal Program at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, and served as its director from 1991 to 1997. This is Paul Sperry's third summer at SongFest.