Musical programs of the San Francisco-based choir Soli Deo Gloria are known for their originality: Donald McCullough’s Holocaust Contata has been paired with African-American spirituals. A concert entitled “The Music of O” featured works beginning only with the letter “o.” And, the final concert of the 2004-05 season celebrated the dawn of Romanticism and included Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor, and Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42 (Wie der Hirsch schreit nach frischem Wasser).

Artistic director and conductor Allen Simon ’82 has been responsible for the group’s sometimes eclectic selection of sacred music for nearly half of the choir’s 30-year history.

Well-attended concerts and the continued popularity of the 40-member choir, made up of individuals from six Bay Area counties, attest to his artistic prowess.

This season’s programs also included spirituals, English a cappella music, and an annual Christmas show, for which Simon arranged much of the music. Simon has spent each summer for the last 14 years creating these original programs. He plays through music, considers the difficulty of each piece, tries to find the right mix of fast and slow songs that will appeal to audiences, and seeks affordable orchestras.

Mauna Arnzen, a tax accountant and eight-year member of the choir, said Simon has a real gift for programming. “He takes us in some real strange and unusual places,” said Arnzen. “Sometimes we wonder, ‘Oh my god, what’s he getting us into?’ But it almost always turns out to be a wonderful experience,” Arnzen said.

Twenty-year Soli Deo Gloria veteran Renee Sheehan enjoys the challenge of more difficult music and less frequently sung songs.

“He’s given us challenges musically so that we’ve had to work hard to be able to come to the level that he demands,” said Sheehan, a registered nurse with an A.A. degree in music.

Simon is very exacting, Sheehan said, but has a great sense of humor.

“If you don’t do something to the level that he wants in the musicality, particularly in interpretation, we have to immediately repeat it to get it correct. He doesn’t do it in a way that makes it frustrating for the singer; he just makes it challenging. He approaches [the music] with the attitude that we can do this, and it’s more a case of reminding us that it would be better if it were perfect.”

For example, in order to get his point across about the Latin word “in,” Simon wears—at rehearsals only—a brightly striped, tall, floppy felt hat (think “Cat in the Hat”) known as the “in” (pronounced “een”) hat. Sheehan said, chuckling, “He doesn’t let people say ‘in’ if it’s Latin; it should be ‘een.’ He’s a stickler about that.”

Simon’s enthusiasm is contagious, she said, because of the way his face and body express the music being performed. “His facial expressions are very clear so that if it’s a joyous part of the music, his face reflects that. He’s attempting for us to get that emotion into the way we sing the music. Especially in concert, he’s extremely expressive.”

“He has a very elastic, almost dance-like, conducting style even in rehearsal, so he gives a great deal of energy to the chorus and is able to elicit the kinds of sounds he wants to get out of us,” said Arnzen. “That’s what is special about him, compared to other conductors I’ve worked with. He really radiates a great deal of energy.”

Some of that energy has also been spent on technical endeavors. At one time, Simon, a self-taught programmer, had a home business selling music education software. From a piece of software he wrote in 1991 called Explorations, Simon spun off a music worksheet generator that received high marks from teachers. The product, Music Maid, sold well for almost nine years before he sold the company last year.

Simon has found other ways to use his programming skills in combination with his musical talent. He was Web site developer for ChoralNet.org and is currently updating Wikipedia music articles, “strictly for fun.”

Simon’s main focus, however, continues to be working as a conductor and music consultant. His varied career has included being a voice coach for youngsters, conducting operettas for the Stanford (University) Savoyards, and lecturing at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif.

The son of a U.C. Riverside musicology professor, Simon took piano lessons as a youngster. His interest in music, math and science led him to Harvey Mudd College, where the diverse selection of humanities courses at Mudd and the other Claremont Colleges suited his interests. He took all the undergraduate requirements for a degree in music at Scripps and graduated with an independent program of study (IPS) degree from Mudd. After earning advanced degrees from Westminster Choir College and the University of Arizona, he worked for a short time in the technology industry after moving to Palo Alto. Simon was singing in his church choir when he found out about a local community choir’s need for a conductor.

At the time, the choral group was called the Bay Area Lutheran Chorale. Simon stepped in and suggested a name change for wider appeal. “We thought we could make a better connection with the arts community if we had a more artsy sounding name,” he said.

He refined Soli Deo Gloria’s artistic direction by assigning “more serious master works” and upped their concert schedule from three performances per year to nearly 11. He also added a chamber group.

“I think the quality of musicianship in the group has increased quite a bit,” he said. A lot more members are themselves music teachers or conductors—Simon’s wife, Julia, for one. She is assistant conductor of the GRAMMY-Award winning Ragazzi Boys Chorus, and is a section leader and publicist for Soli Deo Gloria. Major auditions for the choir are held in fall, and Simon alone does the selecting.

“I found it more valuable to do group auditions and have people sing together,” he said. “Singing solo is so intimidating. People don’t do their best if they are scared to death; I don’t get to hear what they really sound like. That doesn’t help me evaluate them.”

Unlike the infamously callous “American Idol” judge (Simon Colwell), this Simon gets no satisfaction from turning people away. “Definitely one of the most difficult parts of my job is rejecting people,” he said. When re-auditioning the existing group, he sometimes has to dismiss members whose voices have weakened. “It’s an extremely painful part of my job. But it has to be done, and somebody’s got to do it.”

Pragmatism is essential, but,  according to Simon, the real key to conducting is being an expert manager.

“You have to have a sense of the big picture and coordinate a lot of little details,” he said. “I don’t make any noise as the conductor. I’m encouraging [the musicians and singers] to make music as best they can, and I’m coordinating them. It’s also a huge amount of listening. What a conductor does is 90 percent done in rehearsal. I have to listen to what they’re doing and coordinate if people have different ideas about how things should go, then solve it if they’re not in tune.”

While Simon will remain artistic director for next season—which means spending this summer creating more imaginative musical programs—he will take a year-long sabbatical as conductor of the choir. After Simon leads one concert this fall, guest conductors will carry out the rest of Soli Deo Gloria’s season. Simon expects to do his usual guest conductor and consulting gigs and will likely spend more time with his new vocal jazz ensemble, the San Andreas Singers. With Simon accompanying on piano, his wife and four others perform close harmony vocal jazz, similar in style to the Manhattan Transfer, and have among their repertoire several of Simon’s original arrangements, including one of the “Sesame Street” songs, “Rubber Ducky.” They’ve spent much of their time thus far rehearsing and socializing—a wine and cheese audition was as important as vocal ability, said Allen, half-jokingly—but may begin to ramp up their appearances at private parties, coffee houses, senior residence facilities and a cappella competitions.

Simon envisions one day doing a sabbatical exchange to France for one year. His children, ages 5 and 12, attend a French immersion school, and he and Julia are also learning the language. Until he returns to the lectern in Fall 2006, a combination of music and technology will keep life interesting—and fun.