Recordings

Reviews

Contact Info, Bios & Press kit

30-second overview

Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that at least a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. Her persistence at this activity, as well as at non-fiction writing, public speaking, wildlife photography, and the shameless instigation of insufferable puns on Facebook, has led to a happy life. Created from a broad musical palette that defies genre, Alex's acoustic and electroacoustic works are performed and broadcast daily across the U.S. and internationally. Ms. Shapiro's pieces are published by Activist Music, and can be found on over twenty commercial releases from record labels around the world.

This pretty much sums things up. You can continue reading Alex's story, or click the arrow to cut to the chase.

Photo: Paul Chepikian

Studies

Born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Manhattan, Alex began composing as a much shorter person at age nine. At fifteen, she was encouraged by Leo Edwards in her first private composition lessons during a summer program at Mannes College of Music, at which she also had her first experience building a synthesizer and writing remarkably dreadful electronic music. Alex continued to explore acoustic and synthesized pieces the following two summers with Michael Czajkowski and George Tsontakis, as the youngest composer at the Aspen Music School. Subsequently, Alex was educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, where she pursued electronic music with Elias Tanenbaum, and was a composition student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano.

An accomplished pianist, Ms. Shapiro was a student of New York recitalist Marshall Kreisler, and she is an active guitarist as well. Alex also plays very bad flute, an instrument sometimes found in the woodwind section wedged between the alto flute and the bass flute.

Geography, physical and musical

In 1983 Shapiro moved to Los Angeles, California, eventually settling in Malibu and accessorizing her music life with reptiles, astronomy, volunteer civil liberties activism, sailing, and plastic dinosaurs. She composed movie and television scores for the first fifteen years of her career, until the joy of scoring a low-budget feature film with a small orchestra in 1996 reawakened her love of composing chamber music. By the late 1990’s, Alex shifted her focus entirely to the concert world, and devised inventive ways to use the still-new internet to let people know about this still-new composer. Thanks to an understanding of the music business from having worked in Hollywood, and to lots of experience as a recording engineer and computer geek, her career thrived.

In 2007, established both in person and in pixels, Alex and her plastic dinos traded the traffic and wildfires of southern California for a slightly less dangerous life on Washington State's remote San Juan Island. When she's not composing, Alex procrastinates on her next piece by pointing her camera at the surrounding wildlife, resulting in sometimes-even-award-winning images, including one that hangs in The Spirit of Flight 2013 exhibit at Seattle’s Museum of Flight (and also dangles at the top of this web page). Shapiro’s audio and photos fill her blog, Notes from the Kelp, accompanied by her essays on animals, sea life, and human nature that connect not only Alex’s music, but her heart, to a wide sphere of colleagues and audiences.

All right, now that we're up to current, here comes the pithier stuff.

Plugging in

Shapiro is a pioneer in the uses of digital media for the promotion of artists' works, and their context within communities. Through interactive social networks and collaborative Skype sessions, Alex enjoys building relationships with musicians and listeners, preferring to create an affinity for her music by engaging others in their own interests. The author of many articles on new media, in 2009 Shapiro was invited to Washington, D.C., to testify in a Federal Communications Commission hearing about broadband access and digital rights.

Firmly believing that the only artist she's in competition with is herself, Alex co-founded the ASCAP Composer Career Workshop touring series, advising fellow music-makers on ways to benefit from their creative output. Shapiro is a familiar festival composer and guest lecturer at universities around the United States, where she mentors students in music composition as well as in business practices. Alex also addresses the philosophy behind a career based on the concepts of kindness, graciousness, and a positive sense of self worth-- topics too rarely discussed in schools.

Recent works

Alex's concert music is a diverse collection spanning from chamber groups to large ensembles, and from purely acoustic pieces to works that pair musicians with prerecorded digital audio. The two newest additions to her catalog are both electroacoustic: Kettle Brew, for timpani, mixed percussion and electronics on which she collaborated with percussionist David Jarvis, who premiered the piece during Shapiro's February 2013 residency as guest composer for Washington State University's Festival of Contemporary Art Music, and Tight Squeeze, an uptempo, 12-tone Latin techno bebop electroacoustic wind band work (that's right), which was also premiered in February 2013, by conductor Miller Asbill at Brevard College, one of the piece's commissioning partners.

Other notable recent premieres include Alex's 2011 suite for electroacoustic symphonic wind band titled Immersion for a consortium of universities led by the University of Minnesota and broadcast nationally on Minnesota Public Radio. A 2012 acoustic sextet for strings, winds and piano titled Perpetual Spark was commissioned and performed by Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble, which will record the piece in the summer of 2013 for their upcoming CD on Cedille Records. Unabashedly More, a mixed piano sextet, was premiered in 2011 at Carnegie Hall by the New York ensemble Lunatics at Large, and pianist Teresa McCollough premiered Ms. Shapiro's solo piano work, Spark, in November 2011 at Roulette in New York City.

Perhaps the most popular of Ms. Shapiro's newest works has been her ground-breaking piece for wind band, prerecorded electronics and printer paper (yes, printer paper), titled Paper Cut. Currently performed weekly around the world, the piece was commissioned by the American Composers Forum's BandQuest program and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the very first electroacoustic work in the middle- and high school repertoire. Paper Cut was featured at the December 2011 Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, performed by the VanderCook College of Music Symphonic Band.

Shapiro is the author of a chapter in the 2013 GIA Publications book, Musicianship: Composing in Band and Orchestra, and will be a guest clinician presenting a workshop on electroacoustic music at the 2013 Midwest Clinic in Chicago.

Advocacy

An enthusiastic leader in the new music community, Ms. Shapiro is the nationally elected concert music representative on the ASCAP Board of Review, is a member of ASCAP's Symphony & Concert Committee, serves on the Board of Directors of The MacDowell Colony, and chairs the Media Council for New Music USA. Shapiro is the past President of the Board of Directors of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, and has also been a board member of U.S. music organizations including The American Music Center, The College Music Society, NACUSA, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists, of which she was Vice president.

Shapiro's volunteer activism extends beyond the music world to that of civil liberties, and includes three elected terms in the 1990's to the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Southern California. During her film composing days, she served as Vice President of the 30,000-member affiliate, chaired its State and National Legislative Action Committee, and received the ACLU’s 1993 Chapter Activist of the Year award. Alex is currently a Board member of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories, a marine science research facility whose mission reflects much of what inspires Shapiro's music.

Photo: Paul Chepikian

Speaking

Ms. Shapiro appears regularly as a speaker at a wide variety of music events, which have included NARAS' Grammy® in the Schools, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's First Nights series, IAWM's International Congress of Women in Music, the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, Colorado, theMinnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, and six of ASCAP's I Create Music Expos in Hollywood. Since 2000 Alex has interviewed over 100 composers as the moderator of the Los Angeles Composer Salon series, and of ACF/LA's Composer to Composer series at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Honors

Ms. Shapiro is the recipient of national honors and recognitions including those from the American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer, and has been awarded artist fellowships from The California Arts Council and The MacDowell Colony. In 2011, Ms. Shapiro was honored by the national music fraternity Mu Phi Epsilon, and presented its highest award given to members, the Award of Merit, for her innovative use of new technologies in developing her composing career and helping colleagues do the same.

Alex's career is multi-dimensional, encompassing composing, speaking, and writing, as well as a great deal of community involvement. Oh, and a lot of nature photography that can be seen throughout this website, and on her blog, Notes from the Kelp. Below is a small sampling of what keeps her busy.

In response to the need for 21st century composers to embrace an entrepreneurial approach to their careers, in 2009 Alex joined forces with composers Stephen Paulus and Jennifer Higdon, and attorney and EAM/Schott Music president Jim Kendrick, to co-found a U.S. touring series of music business seminars titled, The ASCAP Composer Career Workshops. With the full funding support of ASCAP's CEO John LoFrumento, varying combinations of the group with Shapiro and Paulus as the mainstays, conduct four-hour workshops about publishing, copyright, web presence, recording, and many other skills, for composers at all stages of their careers. As of October 2012, nine workshops have been presented around the U.S., including:

Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2012
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 2011
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 2011
ASCAP offices, New York, NY, 2011
The ASCAP "I Create Music" EXPOs, Hollywood, CA, 2010 and 2011
San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, 2010
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2009, and
Philadelphia Music Project, Philadelphia, PA, 2009.

Many CDs are currently available which feature Alex Shapiro's works, and there are new recordings coming out in the next year from a variety of artists. Alex's own CD of several of her favorite chamber works, Notes From the Kelp, was released October 2007 on Innova Recordings and is in its second pressing.

To read what All Music Guide had to say about Alex's CD, Notes from the Kelp, click here

Here's Kyle Gann's remarkably insightful profile on Alex and the music of Notes from the Kelp, for his American Composer series in the May/June 2008 issue of Chamber Music magazine

Here's the wonderful All Music Guide review of Alex's chamber music CD, Notes from the Kelp

In 1994 Ms. Shapiro joined the Board of Directors of The Society of Composers & Lyricists, the professional association of film music artists, and served three terms from 1994-2000, including two years as the organization's Vice president. Alex extended her efforts with The Society of Composers & Lyricists in her role as the Chairperson of the 1996-1999 Film & TV Music Conferences, co-presented in Los Angeles at The Directors Guild of America by the SCL and The Hollywood Reporter.

An engaging public speaker with an unusually broad range of experience, Alex has moderated panels for countless seminars. She's a familiar face to audiences at The Society of Composers & Lyricists, and The American Composers Forum, for which she has interviewed over 100 composers including Steven Stucky, Randy Newman, Mort Subotnick, Anne LeBaron, Mark Watters, Bruce Broughton, Vinny Golia, David Newman, Joan Huang, Stephen Paulus, John Steinmetz, and Bill Kraft for the Los Angeles Composers Salon series, now in its ninth year. Additionally, Alex has also conducted American Composer Forum Composer to Composer interviews at Walt Disney Concert Hall and other Los Angeles venues with guests as diverse as Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Christopher Rouse, Don Davis and Billy Childs.

Alex was the Keynote Speaker at the October 2006 Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference, and represented musicians on a panel she also moderated in June 2008 at the enormous National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, CO, at the Colorado Convention Center.

Among the panel discussions Alex has led for the SCL are The Virtuoso Soloist in Film Music, presented on the scoring stage of 20th Century Fox Studios in 2000 and featuring violinist Joshua Bell (The Red Violin), pianist Ralph Grierson (E.T.), and bagpiper Eric Rigler (Titanic), and the 2004 seminar, Launching Your Film Scoring Career. On the topic of new technologies, Alex moderated a session for the 2004 Music Business Chops seminar in Los Angeles, with industry leaders including CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, Tony van Veen of Disc Makers, and Jim Griffin of Cherry Lane Digital.

In 2004 Alex appeared on stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to co-host the sold-out premiere of Steven Stucky's Pulitzer prize-winning work, Second Concerto for Orchestra, for the L.A. Phil's First Nights series. In January 2006 and again in January 2009, Ms. Shapiro was a panel speaker for the Chamber Music America Conference in New York City. In February 2006 she was the moderator for an evening of composer Chen Yi's works at the New Music Festival at Santa Clara University.

Alex is an especially familiar speaker within the new music community, on the uses of digital media for the promotion of artists' careers. She has been a featured speaker at each of the six ASCAP EXPOs in Hollywood, the 2009, 2010 and 2012 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institutes, the American Composer Forum's Making Music Work series at McNally-Smith College, NETMCDO (Network of Music Career Development Officers), two of Chamber Music America's national conferences in New York City, the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, and around the U.S. at the ASCAP Composer Career Workshops, of which she is a co-founder.

Alex has been a lively guest on numerous radio and podcast shows, and was most recently heard in a July 2012 Swedish Radio interview with host Birgitta Tollan, and in February 2012 on Marvin Rosen's Classical Discoveries show on Princeton Univeristy's WPRB-FM, in a three hour interview during which seven of her works were broadcast.

Other appearances include Los Angeles' KPFK-FM's For the Record with Samm Brown, Music of the Americas with Jeannie Pool, the KXLU-FM Los Angeles program, Trilogy, and The Audition Booth with Martin Perlich on KCSN-FM, as well as WGDR-FM's Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, and the nationally syndicated NPR show,Theme and Variations. An interview Alex gave producer Steven Rosenfeld of Behind the Beat appears on the ASCAP Audio Profiles page, and her interview with John Clare for the WITF-FM radio show Composing Thoughts aired in 2008. The virtual world is an active arena as well, and Alex has been the February 2008 and May 2009 guest on the Second Life Cable Network talk show for Music Academy Online.

In 2009, Shapiro joined fellow ASCAP members on Capitol Hill to meet with numerous senators and congresspeople in an effort to ensure audio visual download rights.

Excerpt from the prepared remarks of Chairman Julius Genachowski
Federal Communications Commission
Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit
Washington, D.C., October 5, 2009

"Now, why is the adoption of fair rules of the road -- Net Neutrality rules -- so important? Well, the artists, songwriters, and independent producers in the music industry know better than most. For example, at a recent public workshop held at the FCC we heard Alex Shapiro who discussed how the Internet allows her to manage her career even from rural Washington State.

Let me read from her testimony: "My name is Alex Shapiro, and I'm a composer. My use of the Internet has significantly shaped the evolution of my career, and has allowed me to reach audiences around the world, obtain commissions, and sell recordings and scores -- all from a fairly isolated outpost on a bridge-less island in Washington State."

Her point is an essential one. You don't have to be Bruce Springsteen to reach your audience on the Internet. You can be an independent artist on an island -- whether literal or musical -- and reach everyone who has an Internet connection."

In her capacity as the Chairperson of the ACLU/SC's State and National Legislation Committee, Alex produced three Conferences that brought State senators, Assembly members, clergy and community leaders together for day-long seminars to openly debate current issues, often related to the same free speech and First Amendment rights upon which all artists rely. Alex is the recipient of three awards from the ACLU honoring her activism, including being named the 1993 Chapter Activist of the Year.

Alex is the featured composer in the ten-page autobiographical lead article, Compose, Communicate and Connect for the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Spring 2005 issue. Widely praised for its candor, the article was reprinted in two parts in the Autumn 2005 and Winter 2006 issues of the magazine of the American Composers Forum, Sounding Board.

Shapiro has been a regular contributor to The Society of Composers & Lyricists' award-winning publication, The Score, and is the author of several columns on composers and new technology, including the journal's cover article entitled Multimedia: You Can Get There From Here. She is also a recent essayist for the American Music Center's online magazine, New Music Box in an exploration of new music and the labels of neo-romanticism, and on the subjects of artists and self worth, and using the web to create income.

In addition to articles on music business and technology for publications ranging from New Music Box to the newsletter for American Express cardholders, Alex is a familiar presence on the Sequenza 21 web blog, winner of the 2005 ASCAP Deems Taylor Internet Award. To read Alex's essays on music, nature and her humorous musings about life in general, click here.

Alex is also the author of the photosonic blog, Notes from the Kelp, which pairs her wildlife photographs with audio clips of her music each week, offering a personal view into her unique island environment.

In April 2006 Alex was invited to contribute to a set of guest essays about bringing new listeners to the symphony, on Drew McManus' widely read orchestra management blog, Adaptistration. Her essay and many others appear in the collection, Take a Friend to the Orchestra.

Shapiro has been profiled in numerous articles and interviews, including being featured in Kyle Gann's American Composer series in the May/June 2008 issue of Chamber Music magazine. Other pieces about her life and work have appeared in New Music Forum, Sigma Alpha Iota's Pan Pipes, Mu Phi Epsilon's Triangle, and NACUSA's Composer/USA, as well as in publications spanning from the Malibu Surfside News to Great Britain's Music & Vision Magazine. She has been featured in articles on working composers in two Film & TV Music Special Issues of The Hollywood Reporter, in the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music and in issues of the American Composers Forum magazine, Sounding Board. The online magazine, Tokafi, has featured Alex twice in wide-ranging interviews for its August 2006 and March 2008 issues, and Alex was the August 2006 featured composer for the professional music network, My Auditions. Alex's life and music have been the subject of several doctoral dissertations.