Alex Shapiro
Alex Shapiro is one of southern California’s best-known composers of acoustic and electroacoustic chamber music. Her works, which blend modal and chromatic harmonies, are heard weekly in concerts and radio broadcasts across the U.S. and internationally, with over one hundred live performances of pieces from her catalog each year. Her music has been recorded by many artists and is available from Cambria Master Recordings, Innova Recordings, Crystal Records and DC Records, and new releases are forthcoming on the Centaur Records, Capstone Records and Oehms Classics/WDR labels.
Shapiro 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, she was a student of New York recitalist Marshall Kreisler. She is an active guitarist as well.
Shapiro is the recipient of national honors and awards including those from The American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, 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 southern California new music community, Shapiro is President of the Board of Directors of The American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, Chairperson of ACF/LA’s Advisory Council, 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. A lively presenter, she has appeared at a wide variety of music events, including NARAS' Grammy® in the Schools, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's First Nights series, and IAWM's International Congress of Women in Music. Alex is the popular moderator of ACF/LA’s Composer’s Salon series in Hollywood, and she is a familiar guest lecturer at many colleges and universities. Alex resides in Malibu and Santa Barbara, California, and when she's not composing she can often be found ocean kayaking, sailing, or communing with the sea life at the tide pools.
PROGRAM NOTES: "BIOPLASM” I named this piece “Bioplasm” because “Oozing Up From the Primordial Sludge” seemed a bit long for a title. Bioplasm is the stuff of life, the germinal matter that’s essential for living beings to generate. This is a squishy piece: rather than exploit the individual voice of each flute, I wanted to create an organism that oozes across the sonic floor as one tethered entity, sometimes slowly, sometimes at a quick pace, but always as one, like a Slinky toy. The blend of homogenous sound with four flutes can be a throbbing pulse of life; add to this four human voices, and it;s a choir of plasma, looking for life to begin.
"Bioplasm" excerpt, from the CD "Above and Beyond" on LAFQ Records
"Surge" excerpt, from the string quintet "Current Events," performed by
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