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Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. She has become one of the Pacific coast's more familiar composers of acoustic and electroacoustic chamber music, and her expressive, dramatic works are performed and broadcast weekly across the U.S. and internationally. Published by Activist Music, Ms. Shapiro's scores are widely distributed, and found in libraries and universities nationwide. Alex's music has been recorded by many artists and is available on over twenty commercially released CDs.

Born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Manhattan, Alex began composing at age nine. She was educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, where she was a composition student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano. Earlier composition studies from age fifteen were with Leo Edwards at Mannes College of Music and with Michael Czajkowski and George Tsontakis at the Aspen Music School. An accomplished pianist, Ms. Shapiro was a student of New York recitalist Marshall Kreisler, and she is an active guitarist as well.

Ms. Shapiro is the recipient of national honors and awards including those from the American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer and Mu Phi Epsilon, and she has been awarded artist fellowships from The California Arts Council and The MacDowell Colony.

An enthusiastic leader in the new music community, Alex is a strong advocate for other artists through her speaking appearances and her published articles. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center, sits on ASCAP's Symphony & Concert Committee, and is the recent President of the Board of Directors of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles. She is an advisor for The MacDowell Colony, and has served as an officer on the boards of national music organizations including NACUSA, The College Music Society, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists. Her volunteer activism extends beyond the music world, and encompasses three terms she served in the 1990's on the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Southern California, including two years as the 30,000-member affiliate's Vice-president, and to her current activities as a Board member of the University of Washington's renowned marine science research facility, the Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Articulate, passionate and entertaining, Ms. Shapiro appears regularly as a speaker at a wide variety of music events, including 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, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, and each 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’s Salon series as well as ACF/LA's Composer to Composer series at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and she is a familiar guest lecturer at many colleges and universities, including being the Keynote speaker at the Society of Composers, Inc. 2006 National Conference. Alex is especially well versed on the uses of digital media for the promotion of artists' careers, and is a speaker for the ASCAP Composer Career Workshop series she helped to create. She recently testified on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C., about broadband access and digital rights issues.

A longtime resident of Malibu, California, Alex now resides on Washington State's San Juan Island, and when she's not composing she can often be found sea kayaking, or communing with the sea life at the tide pools, evidence of which can be found on her blog, Notes from the Kelp.

Alex's life and approach to her music career are the subject of a ten-page autobiographical article, Compose, Communicate and Connect for the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Spring 2005 issue. The article was reprinted in the autumn 2005 and winter 2006 issues of The American Composers Forum magazine, Sounding Board. To download this article, as well as to enjoy several other print and broadcast interviews, click here

Read Alex's November 2007 essay about the nonmusical concepts behind a very music career, All The Things You Are: Five Suggestions for Composing Your Happiness, in the online magazine NewMusicBox

Read Alex's chat on the professional networking website forum, My Auditions, where she was the August 2006 featured guest

Alex appeared for the fourth year in a row in April 2009 as a speaker and mentor at the ASCAP I Create Music Expo in Hollywood, where she shared her advice about promoting one's career on the internet.

In June 2008, Alex represented musicians on a panel she also moderated at the enormous National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, CO, at the Colorado Convention Center. Her guests included leaders from the music, theater and dance world, and the discussion orbited around the topic of creating careers and audiences in the digital world.

Alex was the Keynote Speaker for the 2006 Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

In March 2004, Alex appeared on stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and composer Steven Stucky, guiding the audience through the creation and premiere of Stucky's 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra.

Many CDs are currently available which feature Alex Shapiro's works, and there are a number of new recordings coming out in the next year from a wide variety of artists. Additionally, Alex's own CD of several of her favorite chamber works, Notes From the Kelp, was released October 2007 on Innova Recordings, and she is currently producing a CD of her electro-acoustic works, titled Alextronica.

For full information on CDs, including many audio clips, visit Recordings

From New York's Carnegie Hall and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., to Geneva's CERN and stages from Hong Kong to Havana, Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro, Alex Shapiro's music is heard weekly around the globe. Here is just a sampling:

MoMA of New York, The American Season Germany
Beijing Modern Music Festival China
New Music Festival Cuba
Bowling Green New Music & Art Festival Ohio
Apositsia II Festival   Russia
Aspen Music Festival Colorado
Festival of New American Music California
Festival Nuovi Spazi Musicali Italy
New Music North Festival Canada
Zurich MusikHochschule Festival Switzerland
Delius Festival Florida
Lifting the Veil California
Arts Day Festival Texas
Long Arms Festival Russia
Santa Clara Univ. New Music Festival California
Festival Pianistico Internazionale Italy
FemmeFest California
60 x 60 Project  New York
Hildegard Festival California
Int'l Festival of Art & Ideas Connecticut
Women's Day Electronic Festival California
Contemporary Music Festival Kansas
Musica delle Donne California
The Spark Festival Minnesota
Voices on the Edge Electroacoustic California
The Great Southwest Flute Fest Arizona
Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo Mexico
Henry J. Bruman Summer Festival California
Stellenbosch Music and Art Festival South Africa
Internationales Beethovenfest Germany

American Academy in Rome Italy
Pacific Serenades California
The Schubert Club Minnesota
MoMA in Berlin Germany
North/South Consonance New York
Cutting Edge New York
Goethe-Zentrum Iceland
Old First Concerts San Francisco
Uni Rio Musica Rio de Janeiro
CERN Series Geneva
American Modern Ensemble New York
Bucheon Cultural Series South Korea
eXindigo! California
Conservatorio di Musica di Frosinone Italy
Sundays Live! California
Forum London Composers Group England
Princeton Composers Forum New Jersey
Stolberger Musiksommer Germany
Music at Noon California
Pacific Composers Forum California
New Directions California
In Praise of Music California
Sempre Musica Society California
Musica in Villa Italy
Row Twelve Boston
ensemble Green California
The Dominant Club Music Assn California
Mu Phi Epsilon California
Santa Fe New Music New Mexico
Mladi Chamber Ensemble California
Chamber Music Palisades California

American Guild of Organists Convention Utah
International Congress of Women in Music London
National Museum of Women in the Arts Washington, D.C.
World Saxophone Congress Minnesota
SEAMUS California
College Music Society National Conference New Mexico
NACUSA National Conferences California
California Association of Professional Music Teachers
College Music Society State Conference California
Texas Music Teachers Association Convention
Society of Composers, Inc. Arizona
Mu Phi Epsilon Regional District Conference California
ClarinetFest Missouri
International Double Reed Society Texas
International Tuba Euphonium Conference Colorado

Each of Alex Shapiro's concert scores are published by her company Activist Music and are directly available through the Purchase page of this website. The entire Activist Music catalog is available through J.W. Pepper and Son, Inc., and most works in her catalog are also distributed by Theodore Front Musical Literature, Inc., Harrassowitz, and Hickey's Music Online. Ms. Shapiro's flute music is also available through Flute World, and Carolyn Nussbaum Music Company; her music for double reed instruments may also be ordered through TrevCo Music, her brass music is also available from BVD Press and Tuba-Euphonium Press, and her percussion music can be found at Steve Weiss Music.

The name Activist Music originates from Ms. Shapiro's belief that all people must be encouraged to raise their voices, articulate their principles and do what they can to affect change around them, whether in politics, within their own neighborhoods, or through the art which they share with others. Activist Music is an elected member of the National Music Publishers' Association, which works to protect intellectual property rights and expand U.S. Copyright law.

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.

A well known 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, Bruce Broughton, Vinny Golia, David Newman, Stephen Paulus, John Steinmetz, Joan Huang 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 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 four ASCAP EXPOs in Hollywood, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, the American Composer Forum's Making Music Work series at McNally-Smith College, NETMCDO (Network of Music Career Development Officers) and 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.

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, and she testified on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C., about broadband access and digital rights issues.

Alex has been a lively guest on numerous radio and podcast shows, including 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.

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 American Composers Forum magazine, Sounding Board.

Alex 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 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 new book, 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 two doctoral dissertations.

With her commitment to sharing knowledge about music and about the business of working as a musician, Alex is regularly invited to be a guest lecturer to composition classes at colleges, universities and music conservatories across the U.S., several of which have produced concerts devoted to her music. Among the many institutions at which she has spoken are The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), California State University at Sacramento, Santa Clara University, Cornish College of the Arts, University of Chicago, and University of California at Santa Barbara.

Alex is a featured presenter at a myriad of music events, with past appearances including the NARAS Grammy in the Schools program, The Mancini Institute's electronic music composition workshop at the Los Angeles High School of the Arts and IAWM's International Congress of Women in Music in London. In July 2004, Alex was the Composer-in-Residence and Festival Forum Moderator at The Walden School, and in February 2006 she was the Composer-in-Residence and Moderator for the New Music Festival at Santa Clara University. In February 2006, Alex was a guest once again at the University of California at Santa Barbara, giving a talk to the school's composition students titled Out in the World: The Notes Ahead, and in October 2006 she was composer-in-residence and Keynote Speaker at the Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference held at Arizona State University.

Alex's life in the San Juan Islands
when she's not in her studio.

Along with her involvement in the music industry, Ms. Shapiro has distinguished herself in an additional area of passionate pursuit— civil liberties. She served on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California from 1990 to 1996; as Vice President of the nation's largest, 30,000 member affiliate, Ms. Shapiro frequently appeared on radio and television broadcasts as a spokesperson for a wide variety of individual and artistic freedoms.

In her capacity as the Chairperson of the ACLU/SC's State and National Legislation Committee, she 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.

As a certified sailor, a sea kayaker and an avid tide-pooler, Alex's daily life reflects her love of marine biology. In 2008 she was honored to join the Development Advisory Board of the renowned University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories.

"Don't let look and location put you off (My gosh, she lives in Malibu!?!) here's a first-rate, real composer. Her piano sonata is tough, tightly controlled motivically in the manner of mid-century American serious composers, but it is also musically tense and expressive. This is the genuine article.

Of Bow and Touch (Double Bass and Piano) which was winner of a 2001 award from The International Society of Bassists, sounds here in the brief clip and proves a very interesting and effective work. I enjoyed the work Re:pair for Two Baroque Flutes. Delightful. You can hear clips of a number of her compositions and read her interesting biography -- she's done a huge amount not only as a musician, but as a civil rights activist.

Alex Shapiro is a name people should know, she's got it all. She is, in a word, a serious and significant composer of beautiful music. Hats off! And you can buy her music at the site. Excuse me, I just have to go and put in my order now... "

"...[Shapiro's music] is enough to give one hope for the contemporary music scene."

— James Manheim, All Music Guide, November 2007

—David Cleary, New Music Connoisseur September 2003

"This recital, consisting of music for percussion and piano opens with Alex Shapiro’s wonderfully descriptive At the Abyss. It is the longest work on the program, and is reflective of the composer’s concerns for current social issues including politics and ecology. Well constructed, and full of interesting sounds, the work reminded me of some of the more creative film scoring that I have heard. This is music that conjures images in the mind, and the joy of it all is that those images will vary from listener to listener."

—Kevin Sutton, MusicWeb-International January 2006

"This is not a "percussion" recording, but it is full of wonderful compositions, several of which make prominent use of percussion. This eclectic group of pieces by Alex Shapiro run the gambit from joyful, almost giddy moods to dark, somber colors that remind one of Bartok or possibly Berg... This inspiring recording is great to listen to regardless if one is a percussionist or not. But "At the Abyss" should be considered by any percussionists looking for great literature to perform."

------— Tom Morgan, Percussive Notes, April 2008

"... a perky and thoroughly delightful duet for flute and oboe by the local composer Alex Shapiro, was brand-new, and Shapiro was on hand to deliver a few words about her piece..."

------— Alan Rich, L.A. Weekly, July 2005

"Alex Shapiro’s Music for Two Big Instruments, written for Norm Pearson (tuba player with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), is the perfect intro for an excellent CD! It is a very powerful piece..."

—Sergio Carolino, Tuba News, September 2005

"Gifted with an intuitive musical sense complimented by a warm and expansive personality, Alex Shapiro has achieved success in a field few women have even entered."

—Peggy Hall Kaplan, Malibu Surfside News, October 2000

—Jeff Gower, The Delius Festival Report, April 1999

To contact Alex Shapiro,
email is best.
Click here to send Alex a note

You can also leave
a voice message
or send a fax by dialing:
(270) 916-0093

The ocean is a significant part of Alex's life, and if Alex wasn't a musician, she'd probably be a marine biologist. Click above for local information about this beautiful environment which inspires her music.

How else does Alex spend her time? In addition to being a sailor, she loves ocean kayaking and downhill skiing. Alex tries to balance her music life with her love of the outdoors and the intoxicating scent of SPF 50 sunscreen.

For more local photos, visit Alex's blog, Notes from the Kelp.