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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 most familiar composers of acoustic and electroacoustic music, and her expressive works are performed and broadcast daily across the U.S. and internationally. Published by Activist Music, Shapiro's music can be found on over twenty commercially released CDs from record labels around the world.

Born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Manhattan, Alex began composing as a much shorter person 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.

Alex's concert music is a diverse, dramatic collection spanning from chamber groups to large ensembles, and from purely acoustic pieces to works that pair musicians with prerecorded digital audio. The 2010-2011 concert season included nine premieres of Shapiro commissions, including a groundbreaking 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. Also premiered were a dectet for strings and winds titled Archipelago for Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble; Unabashedly More, a mixed chamber sextet premiered at Carnegie Hall by the New York ensemble Lunatics at Large; Slowly, searching for German pianist Susanne Kessel for her latest CD and concert tour; and Elegiac, for clarinet, cello and piano, premiered by Chamber Music San Juans, a Pacific Northwest ensemble which also gave the premiere of Shapiro's Intermezzo for Cello and Piano in August 2011.

Vendaval de Luvina, a haunting piece for piano, digital audio and prerecorded spoken word based on a short story by Mexican author Juan Rulfo, was premiered in California by pianist Teresa McCollough, who will be giving the California and New York City premieres of Ms. Shapiro's latest solo piano work, Spark, in November 2011. Perhaps the most instantly popular of Ms. Shapiro's newest pieces has been Paper Cut, an unusual offering for wind band, prerecorded electronics and printer paper (yes, printer paper), commissioned for the BandQuest series by the American Composers Forum and the National Endowment for the Arts. The piece, distributed by Hal Leonard Corporation, has rapidly become a favorite with high schools and colleges, and has been performed many times throughout the U.S., Canada and Asia. Paper Cut will be featured at the December 2011 Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, performed by the VanderCook College of Music Symphonic Band.

An enthusiastic leader in the new music community, Alex is a strong advocate for other artists through her speaking appearances, published articles and volunteerism. She is the elected national 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. Ms. Shapiro is the past President of the Board of Directors of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, and has also served as on the boards of national music organizations including The American Music Center, The College Music Society, NACUSA, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists. Shapiro's volunteer activism extends beyond the music world to additional interests, and includes 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. Reflecting an affinity with the ocean that inspires much of her music, Alex is also a Board member of the University of Washington's renowned marine science research facility, the Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Photo: Paul Chepikian

Articulate, passionate and entertaining, 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, 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. 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 touring series she co-founded. She recently testified on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C., about broadband access and digital rights issues.

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. In August 2011, Ms. Shapiro was honored with the national music fraternity Mu Phi Epsilon's highest award given to members, the Award of Merit, for her inventive use of new technologies in developing her composing career and helping colleagues do the same.

A longtime resident of Malibu, California, Alex now resides on Washington State's San Juan Island. When she's not composing, she procrastinates on her next piece by communing with the sea life that surrounds her, as seen on her music- and photo-filled nature blog, Notes from the Kelp.

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. Here is a small sampling of what keeps her busy.

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

Alex has been interviewed twice for the online webzine Tokafi. Her March 2008 (1.) interview ranges from the serious to the silly, and her August 2006 interview (2.) exposes her typically direct opinions on life and music.

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

Alex appeared for the sixth consecutive year in April 2011 as a speaker and mentor at the ASCAP I Create Music Expo in Hollywood, presenting the Composer Career Workshop she co-founded with attorney and EAM/Schott Music publisher Jim Kendrick and composer Stephen Paulus.

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.

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 is in its second pressing, and she is currently producing a CD of her electro-acoustic works, titled Alextronica.

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

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 are three recent premieres:

Alex has been very fortunate to receive positive affirmation about her music from many sources, like these:

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 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 and 2010 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, 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.

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 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 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 Minnesota, University of California at Santa Barbara and University of Chicago.

Alex is a featured presenter at myriad 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.

Alex's career has become representative of the way the internet and digital technology have given anyone with a computer the ability to create a global presence, as demonstrated in this quote:

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."

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 used to be an avid downhill skier until she accepted that gravity is not just a concept, it's a law. 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, and Alex's observations about music and everything that inspires it, visit Alex's blog, Notes from the Kelp.