Alex Shapiro (born January 11, 1962) is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music favoring combinations of modal harmonies with chromatic ones, and often emphasizing strong pulse and rhythm.
The majority of Shapiro's catalog is chamber works, and since 2008 she has also composed several commissions for symphonic wind band, several of which include the use of prerecorded electronics. Performance highlights include Shapiro's Sonata for Piano at the Beijing Modern Music Festival in China, For My Father from her Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood on the MoMA of New York series The American Season in Berlin, Desert Tide premiered at the Stellenbosch New Music and Art Festival in South Africa, Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and At the Abyss performed at Carnegie Hall in New York. Other notable works in her catalog include Deep, a work for contrabassoon and electronics; a flute quartet, Bioplasm; a string quintet, Current Events, and Paper Cut, for wind band, electronics and printer paper, commissioned by the American Composers Forum BandQuest series in 2010.
Shapiro is an active participant in the U.S. art music community. She currently serves on the board of directors of the American Music Center and the MacDowell Colony and sits on the ASCAP Symphony & Concert Committee; in 2010 she was elected as the concert music composer representative to the ASCAP Board of Review. She is the recent president of the board of directors of The American Composers Forum of Los Angeles and Moderator of the Los Angeles Composers Salon series from 2000 to the present, for which she has interviewed over 100 composers. Shapiro testified in September 2009 on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C., about broadband access and digital rights issues.
Shapiro served on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California from 1990 to 1996, including a term as the 30,000-member affiliate's vice president. She is the recipient of three awards from the ACLU honoring her activism, including being named the 1993 Chapter Activist of the Year.
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
Tania León is a Cuban-born American composer of both large scale and chamber works. She is also renowned as a conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations.
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Melinda Jane Wagner is a US composer, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Her undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She received her graduates degrees from University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the 'Bravo!' Vail Valley Music Festival. Some of her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise.
Kirke Mechem is an American composer. His first opera, Tartuffe, with over 450 performances in nine countries, has become one of the most popular operas written by an American. He has composed more than 250 works in almost every form. In 2002, ASCAP registered performances of his music in 42 countries. He has been called the "dean of American choral composers". His memoir, Believe Your Ears: Life of a Lyric Composer, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2015; it won ASCAP Foundation's 48th annual Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding musical biography.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Arlene Sierra is an American composer of contemporary classical music, working in London, United Kingdom.
Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.
Susan Hurley is an American composer living and working in Los Angeles, California.
Robert Paterson is an American composer of contemporary classical music, as well as a conductor and percussionist. His catalog includes over 100 compositions. He has been called a "modern day master" and is primarily known for his colorful orchestral works, large body of chamber music and clear vocal writing in his operas, choral works, vocal chamber works and song cycles.
Huck Hodge is an American composer of contemporary classical music.
William Jay Sydeman was a prolific American composer. He was born in New York. He studied at Duke University, and received a B.S. degree in 1955 from the Mannes School of Music, having studied with Felix Salzer, Roy Travis, and Roger Sessions. He received his master's in music from the Hartt School in 1958, studying under Arnold Franchetti and Goffredo Petrassi. From 1959 to 1970 he joined the composition faculty at his alma mater Mannes School of Music.
Faye-Ellen Silverman is an American composer of contemporary classical music. She is also an author and an educator.
Lisa Carol Bielawa is a composer and vocalist. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and spent a year composing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Victoria Ellen Bond is an American conductor and composer in New York City.
Derrick Skye is a composer, conductor, musician, and educator based in the Los Angeles area who often integrates musical practices from cultures around the world in his works. The Los Angeles Times has described Skye's music as "something to savor" and "enormous fun to listen to." The Times (London) described Skye’s music as “deliciously head-spinning.”
Kate Soper is a composer and vocalist. She was a recent American Academy in Rome fellow and Guggenheim Fellow as well as a 2012–13 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her chamber opera, Ipsa Dixit.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In 2019, Coleman's orchestral work, Umoja, Anthem for Unity, was commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Coleman's Umoja is the first classical work by a living African American woman that the Philadelphia Orchestra has performed.
Andrea Clearfield is an American composer of contemporary classical music. Regularly commissioned and performed by ensembles in the United States and abroad, her works include music for orchestra, chorus, soloists, chamber ensembles, dance, opera, film, and multimedia collaborations.
Will Healy is an American composer, pianist, and artistic director of ShoutHouse, an orchestral hip-hop collective.
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