Background
McAllister was born in Mossend, North Lanarkshire.
McAllister was born in Mossend, North Lanarkshire.
She undertook her undergraduate studies at the University of Glasgow, graduating Bachelor of Music with first class honours.
She is the Director of Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and is renowned as an authority on the works of Sergei Prokofiev. At the same time she was a part time student at the RSAMD studying piano with Wight Henderson and viola with Frieda Peters. In the late 1960s she spent three years at the University of Cambridge researching the operas of Sergei Prokofiev.
She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in 1970.
Her work on Prokofiev resulted in intensive work in Moscow, Street St. Petersburg and throughout the southern Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. In the 1970s and 1980s she broadcast and published extensively on many aspects of Soviet and Russian music Her compositions from this time include chamber works, song cycles and works for music theatre, as well as electro-acoustic pieces.
From 1969 she was a lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Edinburgh, teaching composition, twentieth-century history and analysis, and established the electronic and recording studios there. She was appointed Director of Music at the Academy in 1986, and from 1996 to 2006 she was additionally Vice-Principal.
Rita McAllister edited the original version of Prokofiev"s War and Peace which was premiered in Glasgow on 22 January 2010.
