A Composer's Insight Into Contemporary Music
An Interview with Alex Shapiro
Alex is a gifted composer, writer, arts advocate, and more. Her music has been performed globally. She is a pioneer in incorporating live media into her compositions in new and intriguing ways. Her music crosses multiple styles and does not identify with any specific genre. Her work breaks down barriers and has been an inspiration to teachers and students alike.
Podcast: A Composer's Insight to Contemporary Music
https://interview with Alex Shapiro
Background music: Tight Squeeze - Alex Shapiro
The written transcription follows below:
Background
JY: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another series of podcasts about music, IBDP music, international music, and global music. I'm very excited, pleased, and honored to have a special guest with us today. Her name is Alex Shapiro. She's not only a very gifted composer, she's also a writer, a photographer and arts advocate, and a very, very nice person. Her music has been performed all over the world.
I had the honor and the privilege of meeting her several years ago at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, IL, where I first came across her music and her work and the caliber and genre of work that she's doing. She has a unique ability to combine live and recorded sounds and use multimedia in a novel way. Her music is hard to describe in terms of being a particular genre. I guess we simply have to say it's genre-less And that's another reason why I thought it would be so wonderful in terms of IB thinking to be talking about genres and how to think about new ideas and new possibilities and tearing down barriers. So I am very much looking forward to this podcast and chatting with you, Alex. So let's go ahead and get it going. Maybe you can start simply by telling us a little bit about yourself and your relationship both in and out of the music profession.
AS: And Jim, it is such a pleasure to talk to you and you've given me a very, very kind and generous intro. So thank you. I think the basis of my genre-less, and it really is that I think you're spot on. My genre-less approach and boundary-less approach to the music I've been writing for a long time might start with the fact that I was lucky enough to grow up in Manhattan, in New York City, right in the middle of New York City. And at a time in the 1960s and 70s when I was able to take advantage of all the amazing things going on in that city you live in all genres all at the same time.
I mean, one night I'd be at the Village Vanguard listening to the top jazzers. The next night I'd be at the Metropolitan Opera. The next night it would be a ballet. The next night it would be CBGB's or Studio 54. Where, by the way, this was the time when punk and disco were coming to the fore all at the same time, which is hilarious in and of itself.
But I think that when you grow up lucky enough to be in a place that offers all that, and then lucky enough, in my case, to have parents that allow you the run of the city to just do what you want to do, it's kind of magic. The way I could afford this, by the way. I always feel like I have to say this because it sounds like a lot of money, but I babysat for an $1.25 an hour. At the time, that was the going rate. I think that was the top rate. And not that I was worth it. I don't think I was that great, but I did the job enthusiastically enough to be able to save all that money. At the time, standing-room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera were $3.00. So the Vanguard cost me $5 to get into for two sets. I think for the second set I just had to buy a beer or something. It was awesome. So back then, I don't know if this is the case anymore, but back then, a teenager could afford to go to these places and immerse themselves in this.
So that was monumentally important, I think in my view of the world because I was in the melting pot in a sense, you have so many cultures in Manhattan, and I was availing myself of everything that I could think of that was going on there from so many different cultures and styles. And I was writing. It was not particularly good at the time, but I was composing. And so all of that would start to seep through, I'm sure, in my influences and in what I was writing. So sort of the perfect happy artistic storm. And so that's my background and what probably very directly, along with a lot of travel and other things I've gotten to do around the world, it's probably led me to the kind of stuff I write now, which within one piece I might be 12- tone and pop and big band and Lord knows what, you know, like all even in one piece and hopefully in a cohesive way where it actually makes sense. But I'll take people on a journey that maybe a lot of composers won't necessarily go to all those places.
JY: Was there a golden moment when you decided you were going to be a composer?
AS: Yeah, there was. And this speaks to the power of teachers, the incredible power of any of us who say something supportive to someone else. When I took my first formal composition lessons one summer in Manhattan at Manus College of Music, they had a summer program with a wonderful guy named Leo Edwards, who probably has retired from there by now. But he was very kind, a very, very good composer. And I don't think I was in any great shape one way to the other, but I brought him my music. He looked at it, We did this every week. One lesson, he turned to me and he said, Alex, you have the gift of melody. And I'm sure he only meant it very off the cuff, right? It was no big deal. But I am 62 years old and I still remember that statement so well. I mean, if you want to talk about a Seminole moment, there were, I'm sure a number of them, but that was one of them that when you get a little bit of encouragement, just even off the cuff, just a comment, it can propel you. I think all of us have to be so keenly and beautifully aware of the positive power we can have over other people by just giving them a knob. Just acknowledging them, hearing them, telling them something out of the blue that might make them want to keep going. Conversely, it's also important to remember if one is critical and non-supportive, the power of that and those harsher words as well. So keeping that in mind for all of us and especially for educators is huge. We have more of a profound influence than I think we realize day to day.
The Influence of Teaching
JY: As you're saying this, I just thinking, I recently retired from my regular job as a music teacher. You get these notes and messages from students from all over the world that you've worked with students from 20-30 years ago. And you ask, did I do that or I don't remember being that profound? Students said you've changed my life into this. You never know what it is you said or your facial expression or so on. So it's so true.
Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton onUnsplash
AS: Yeah, hearing from people you never know. Sometimes, if I'm doing a Zoom, you know, with a band or whatever, I'll look at, maybe it'll look like everybody's stone-faced, and maybe I'm not getting through to them or whatever. I accept that that's fine. But it turns out then you hear from people individually, it's like that it just rocked them and the whole experience or whatever. You never know. And so I think it's great to go in with that attitude of assuming that you will touch at least one person you know with what you say. And so be kind and be positive and supportive and let everybody you know find their path with support.
Words of Wisdom
JY: Alex, what words of wisdom would you offer any young high school student who likes to write music?
AS: I would say first and foremost, do it. Do it a lot. Keep doing it and know that you can't do it wrong.
I think one of the problems in arts and in education, especially in Western education is a lot of times we're hearing no or you can't do that or you shouldn't do that or whatever. And in art, there really is no should or yes or no. It's a matter of finding your way through trial and error till you find things that click and that they click for you and they may not click for everybody else. And yes, it is important when you're studying, to learn the standard things that one would be taught in music courses, let's say, or any art courses.
But in order to find your own authenticity, you have to be willing and be given permission both by others and by yourself. Very importantly, to take risks and venture off to what you hear and what inspires you. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't be writing the weird kind of stuff I write. You know, no one really gave me permission to do that. It just occurred to me, hey, this might be fun. Let's try this weird stuff.
"Take risks and don't be afraid."
I think my advice for younger people or anybody of any age, they could be 70 and just starting out, is to take risks, Don't be afraid. Give yourself permission to express yourself and by doing so, be as authentic to you and the way you hear as you can. Don't try to sound like everybody else. Everybody else has been taken. There are already a million other people who have their sound great, good for them. And that's awesome. And we want to support those people. But when you're doing it, there's only one you. And I think too many times students can lose sight of that and feel like in order to be validated, they have to sound sort of like what is popular and what is successful. What is expected of them somehow? And if they have teachers telling them that, then I'm not a fan of that kind of teaching. And if they're telling it to themselves, the best advice is to let go of those messages. They're limiting.
The Direction of High School Music Education
JY: You have a lot of contact with schools, you've worked in schools you've worked with students, and more. You're involved with music education. You know the system, you know the ups and downs of it. What would you like to see in a high school music education program? Let's say 5-10 years from now or even longer.
AS: It's probably a long list but I'll be concise. I'm quite loquacious, but I would say, more diversity of composers and their backgrounds and the styles of music because we're still not there yet. It's great to see in the past 10-15 years, there has been a significant push and improvement on what's on students' music stands, but it still is a very small percentage of, what I would call diverse music of the time, etcetera. So that's number one. It's just a given that we have to keep working on that.
#2 is every student right now is entering a world, and by the time they are out of school, they will be completely immersed in a world that is very tech-driven. Traditional education never goes out of style. The importance of learning the same lessons that people learned 200 years ago remains, however, if we don't address the realities of tech, AI, the ethics and copyright issues of what it is to be a citizen in a digital world if we don't address that with them early on, we're missing the boat. And we're not going to be helping them because this is the world that they, I mean, we're all living in. But I think a lot of older people can get by and have their heads in the sand a bit because it doesn't necessarily affect them as much as it's going to affect an 18-year-old, you know, or a 12-year-old for that matter. We have a responsibility to prepare the students for their future. And that means learning. That means that some of us have to ramp up and really learn. We have to pay attention to what's out there.
I think it's our responsibility to prepare students in every possible way. And again, I don't see that happening quite enough in classes. And I'm not saying this just because I happen to write a lot of band music, music that's electroacoustic, or a lot of chamber music that's electroacoustic and thus a little techie. I'm saying if I was only writing string quartets, that this is very important. So that's what I'd like to see, more diversity and more tech knowledge, and education and awareness coming from everybody, the teachers and the students.
JY: You know, as you're talking, I'm just thinking of a paradigm shift of the difference of what it was like for me when I went through my music education program of being taught how to teach, of being the one that is the band director, the leader, the all-knowing, the follow me, do it my way to. It seems like we need to embrace another type of approach. It's OK for a teacher not to know. It's OK to get into the unknown. You mentioned technology and so on. So I'll just relate this sort as a footnote. Several years ago, during my last few years at the American school, our music tech person, retired and they wanted to have the music tech program, but they wanted to have it mainstreamed with the music program. So school leadership came to me and they said, Jim, we want you to run the music tech program along with the band program. I looked at them, mouth dropped. I said you want me to teach music tech? This is what you want. I hardly know how to turn on a computer. And now you're asking me to do this? And they said, well, see what happens. And I just went into it. I took the courses, I delved into it. I got into that course, leading that course.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
We were working with Logic Pro and music sequencers and all sorts of different programs and so on. And there were kids coming into that class that were, I just said, well, let me hear what you got. And they were going, doing those connections and what they were producing was phenomenal. Absolutely, phenomenal. I said, well, slow down. How did you do that? Tell me how you did that. And you said, well, it's just this and this. And so then I have to say, OK, do you know what that is? I would say, OK, in music, we would call that a cadence. We called it the end of the section. We'd call that a full cadence. All right, let's go on to the next thing. So when I look back at when I look back at that experience of being a music tech teacher, it was a real epiphany.
It was the best thing that happened to me in my life, in my teaching career, stepping out of my comfort zone and, and bracing myself for that. It is the future. It is what's going to happen. The other thing that I realized with the use of technology and it's been so prominent in this IB program is the role of the teacher. We are in a position now with education where students have the ability to gain, gather, and use knowledge faster than the rate a teacher can give the knowledge to them. So our roles as teachers are not so much as teachers, but more as mentors. And when young students, young aspiring music teachers come in, it's very important. It was very important for me to impart that to them. You have to be ready for this because 5-10 years from now, this is what you're going to do. Now is the time to Start learning.
AS: Bravo to you. That's really impressive, All of this, your curiosity and your openness and your willingness, because it takes a lot of time to take time out of your already overwhelmed schedule to then on top of it, as you say, take some classes or spend a lot of time in front of your own computer trying to figure out how this stuff works. Bravo. It's a lot to ask of teachers, especially, you know, of teachers who are, notably older than their students, right? You know, as opposed to a 20-something who's probably grown up with this stuff. It is generational to some degree, not entirely, but I think that is, it's so interesting what you say about being mentors because absolutely kids have access now. They have access to everything.
"(Students) don't yet have the critical thinking in place to understand whether what they're accessing is good information or not."
One of the biggest problems is that they don't yet have the critical thinking in place to understand whether what they're accessing is good information or not. And that's where we come in, able to guide them. We can show them lots of stuff, lots of good stuff, but they're on top of it going to be discovering a gazillion things on their own and what they really need in every aspect of their life, much less music. They need the tools internally to discern and decipher whether something is legit or not. Is it AI or not? I mean, that's the world now. It's like, did a human create this or did a computer? And, what are the pros and cons of, you know, of all of this? I'm not the least bit anti-tech, but I am very pro-understanding what you're looking at. Suppose tech is used that it should be, you know, credited, to what is creating the experience. You know, that's very important, not to mention consent and compensation and all those things for the artists that it's that the tech the AI is getting.
Back to the kids being able to teach them by example, even just taking time in the classroom to pull things up. Yeah, or nay, to say, hey, let's type this in and see what comes up. And giving them object lessons. They need these skills desperately. Most adults don't have them. That's why we're in the pickle we're in. You know that most adults believe anything that they see first. It used to be they believed everything they read or saw on TV. Now they believe whatever the search engine throws up at them, which is mostly sponsored and biased things until you get to the 9th thing on the list. And the lack of critical thinking has been a disaster in education for a long time. But it is an issue now more than ever because of the availability of information flying at these students at a record pace.
Views on Supporting Young Teachers
JY: Alex, do you have any thoughts on how we might be able to support young music teachers? You've mentioned being able to develop these skills of critical thinking and critical teaching in our in our program. Any more ideas about how we could better support music teachers keeping an open mind to embrace new ways of thinking and teaching about them?
AS: The more conversation about it, the more interaction we have with music makers, right? The more we have a lot of advocacy programs, especially in the US, whether it's NAFMI, the National Association for Music Education, or Music for All, etc. There are a lot of advocacy organizations here and I'm sure abroad that are very helpful to teachers if they know where to look and, and where to plug in and to be active with them and to get that support. Teachers do need support. It's overwhelming. As I said, it's already a full schedule.
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And now we're asking them to ramp up in a very big way to be the absolute contemporaries of the people they're teaching and to understand and maybe be a step ahead of the people they're teaching who have basically grown up zipping around iPads from the time they're 1 1/2, Their brains are wired differently than ours. It's really that simple. So any kind of support, I think from my perspective as a composer, I feel it's very effective. I do a lot of zooms and I love what I call web hursles. I love them. And I think that's really effective to have people have guests come into the classroom, the band room, the orchestra room, whatever it is, and interact with the students and interact with the teacher and offer support after the fact as well. Both the teachers and the students know that I am always available by e-mail for any questions or help. And I stick by that. I think that's really important for those of us who are writing the music to make ourselves as available as possible and share information. People like me and other people will put together website resources on websites.
"Their brains are wired differently than ours."
Jodie Blackshaw, Rob Diemer, myself, and a bunch of us have these ancillary auxiliary pages with hundreds of links, whether it's for diversity or in my case, tech. I just did a big presentation on AI and immersive media in music performance and education for CBD DNA for the composers at a regional CBD DNA in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. And along with the big, multimedia presentation, I created a companion web page with a gazillion links to get to many different categories and to get people started to give them a starting point because it is so overwhelming. I think those kinds of things anybody can do, it doesn't take that long. It just takes a little time and thought to put something together that will give tools more readily and one-stop shopping to the very people that we're asking to: A, perform our work and B, educate these kids. So it's our responsibility.
I'm not a teacher or an educator, but I feel like I am one by default in that I choose to participate. And I would just say to all my peers who are writers, participate and become ad hoc teachers, because anything that you do is going to support our entire field. Supporting the teachers is incredibly important. It's the most important thing.
Sparking Creativity and Passion for Music
JY: What do you think sparks creativity and passion in music?
AS: Curiosity, curiosity, openness to everything. And again, that circles right back to what how we started this conversation. It comes really, in a classroom setting, in a school setting that comes usually from the top down, the example the teacher sets. If the teacher is sparked and curious and enthusiastic and maybe doesn't have all the answers, that's OK. But hey, let's look at this and talk about it. You know, what is this music coming from this country you never heard of? Let's listen to this.
"If the teacher is sparked and curious and enthusiastic and maybe doesn't have all the answers, that's OK."
Kids learn from examples that they see both positively and negatively, right? If they're lucky enough to have curious parents, that's all the better. But maybe they do or don't. But what we do with them in the classroom can certainly take up some of that good space and bring something to them that they may not have had before. So I think that's what sparks creativity. It's internal and you can't teach somebody per se creativity. I mean, either they kind of have it or they don't. You can't really teach somebody to be a great composer. You can give them tools, right? You can say here is counterpoint, here is motivic development. Here are these things, these forms that will get you through a piece, and here's how to use them. So, and we can teach theory, we can do all these things, but ultimately, either they have a good ear that's connected to their heart or they don't, right? And not everyone does and that's OK. So you can't teach a lot of things, but you can encourage and you can model.
Then by doing that, maybe they'll want to give things a shot. When I do Zooms with all these bands, every single time I say to all the students, whatever their age, I say, you're all good musicians. Each one of you can compose and maybe some of you are already organizing sound in some ways, whether it's, improv or textual stuff and sound design or songwriting or jazz or full-on composed pieces. But I want to make it clear to them that they are all capable. So if you tell them, and you know this so well, Jim, if you tell students that they are capable, if you give them that responsibility and that pat on the head that makes them feel good about themselves, they're probably going to see themselves that way. So it just takes encouragement and curiosity. (Note: see internal link: Critical and Creative Thinking )
Blending Electronic and Acoustic Music
JY: Do you see any type of a future of a melding of electronic music with live/acoustic performance music? How might that look in school?
AS: Absolutely. Well, since I've been doing electro-acoustic pieces for about 15 years now, at a time when almost nobody was doing it. I think Stephen Bryant had ecstatic waters a year before I got onto the band scene. And that I did without ever knowing Stephen, who's now a good friend, without knowing Stephen or his piece. I did this thing called "Paper Cut" for middle schoolers in 2010. So. Yeah. You did "Paper Cut," didn't you? What has been so thrilling is I've been a real proselytizer as any of my colleagues will say that I've been encouraging everybody for all these years to write electro-acoustic music. Come on. It's really fun.
So I think part of it is yes, as the writers themselves and the publishers, the independent publishers, much less the big ones have to encourage more and more of this repertoire. But more to the point of what you're asking, Jim, is what I had done during the pandemic, we all learned a lot because we're at least a year and a half. We were quarantined for at least a year, maybe a year and a half, depending on the area. And in quarantine, you had all these students, and programs, music programs that still had to keep chugging forward somehow, some way. But from a big, big distance and in isolation, which is the absolute opposite of what it is to be in an ensemble. It couldn't have been a harder blow to music performance and students in music performance than being quarantined and having to be stuck in their room by themselves, practicing with no sense to tune to anything else or not, no sense of the musicianship involved in playing with other humans. So that was the downside. But the upside was that they were in a room by themselves and they had a lot of time to practice and to play with the technology. And I took advantage of that.
I created a curriculum called Putting the E in Ensemble. It's still used now, that we're not in quarantine, but it was used by many schools at that time. Where this leads up to a direct answer to your question, what I had them doing. He's breaking these ensembles. Let's say you had a band or an orchestra of, you know, let's say 60 members and you break them all down into small groups, subsets of maybe six people in a group, whether it could be homogeneous by instrument or it could be a total mash-up, whatever you wanted to do. Then you ask them all, because remember, they're all at home. You ask them all to open up, let's say Audacity, a free program, cross-platform. It doesn't cost anything. Everybody can use it and record themselves on their instrument playing an original motive that they wrote. It could be very short or longer, whatever they want to do, but something reasonably short, under a couple of lines. So then what do they do?
They upload each one in that group uploads their original motive to a place where they all have access to all six tracks from each other. And then they dump all those tracks into their DAW, digital audio workstation, whatever they're using, to put their tracks together and they start composing with this original material. It's a group composition. Every composition is different. And the joy in their expressions and the whole process were filled with joy. Everybody was so amazed by the fact that they could compose and they could do this. They got an object lesson in motivic development and how to take information, use it, and modify it. Because of course, they could run things through processing, they could chop things up, you know, all the wonderful tools we have digitally. And they ended up so many of these students who had never composed before ended up with pieces that were really sophisticated.
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And by the way, and this is one of my favorite things, is if they did not, which most of them didn't if they did not set up any rules, we're going to be in a flat or something like that. You know, they didn't set any guardrails for what tempo or what key tonal center they were going to be in. Guess what, if they all are delivering pieces that are in, let's say out of six people, maybe in four different tonal centers, you end up with this amazingly beautiful chromatic sound world that they're all diving into and digging that. I guarantee you, knowing what young students tend to do, none of them, if left to their own devices to just write a piece of music, none of them would have been in that chromatic sound world. You know, young people tend, I don't know why this is, but they really do tend to be tonally centered, most of them. And this was a great way of kicking everybody off their ass.
JY: Do you think that's sort of a Western idea?
AS: Yeah, I think it's very Western. And so I'm dealing with America and Europe.
When I talk about young people being tonally centered, I would like to think that that's not the case, in other cultures where they have a lot more to choose from and many approaches plus a lot more sophisticated rhythm. We have very boring rhythms in Western culture
When you think about it, everything is so plotting and straight. I do my best to do a lot of meter changes and other things, including at the very beginning level to knock people off the dime. But I tell you this, getting back to your your question to wrap, put a bow around everything I'm saying is that what I see for the future with tech and with live? It's both. It's not either or, it's both. Everybody will be that much more fluent and, and have that much faster Internet speeds and fast computers. It's not going to be holding anything in your hand for too much longer, but the world is going to be this hopefully beautiful place where they have that many more tools available to them.
Just the same way that when I'm writing an electro-acoustic piece, I'm writing for all the traditional instruments and I treat the electronics as an equal and separate and additional section of the ensemble. And all I do is the same thing that I would do with any section. The violins or the woodwinds or whatever, they all have their sound. So my track is going to have its sound and create sounds that I can't get out of the instruments. It's just another tool. It's another sound. So that's how I see tech and audio in live music, in education and beyond, in performance, because multimedia and the uses of all this are going to be more prevalent and easier for everybody to accomplish.
Composing and the Ensemble
JY: As you're talking and reflecting on that time of, of COVID and goes down and so on and how we were desperate as music teachers because we couldn't do what we normally did. And we were in the box of doing it this way. So we have to continue to do it this way. But as you're speaking, I think we had the same experience that it was a great time to inspire composition, to inspire creativity, to inspire new approaches to music. And in fact, what the kids were making was absolutely incredible. It was amazing. If we could take some of the advantages of what we had to go through with COVID and revisit those and apply those now to our old mindset, we might be going somewhere. You had to keep an open mind to survive.
AS: That's right. And it gave them tools, by the way, that are necessary from the podium when you're rehearsing a piece. How about when you're writing a piece of music, especially the way I just described your understanding structure in a way that maybe as players they never paid attention to before? And now what I'm seeing is that conductors who went through all this now are, are talking much more about the structure of peace. They're kind of analyzing things in an overall way in an even more successful way.
"What I found from conductors is they said from now on I'm going to be building analysis and composition into my program and that I will make the time for it."
Because students, if they have this understanding, they're putting, the conductor scores up on a screen so that everybody can see the full score. I've never understood why musicians by and large, in a band or orchestra only see their own, their one part. That's crazy to me as a composer. I have to see the entire thing. And if I were a player, I'd want to see the whole thing. Like any chamber player who might want to see the whole score. So we are giving them skill sets that they're going to carry with them. What I found from conductors is they said from now on I'm going to be building analysis and composition into my program and that I will make the time for it. If that means one less piece on the program, you know what, we don't have time to rehearse that seventh piece or whatever, fine. Because they're understanding that the way they've traditionally been doing it, which has been kind of two-dimensional. I don't want to, I don't want to fault anybody, but it's more like, OK, it's the new semester and we're going to plow through. (Note: See internal insert: IB in the Performing Ensemble
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We're learning and rehearsing all these pieces and then we're going to have a concert, right? And it's a very gold ribbon and it's not it, it's and there are, you know, there are lots of listening exercises and tuning exercises. But the goal is always, and we're going to learn all this, play it really well, and then have the concert as opposed to a much more, you know, at the moment goal of let's be, let's absorb what all this is. Let's be holistic about it, which is my preference because it's music, Yeah.
JY: Schools are making progress in this direction. Do you see any changes?
AS: I've seen from my perspective, because I'm on one edge of the spectrum that anybody who's working with me, sure, I see that they're really open to that. I can't speak for what's going on in the greater world at all because I'm not aware of it. I don't know. But I know that all the many conductors that I deal with are like you. I mean, they're totally open and curious and want to keep expanding everybody's skill sets and have a very open approach to genre, to tech, to all these things.
And obviously diversity, hey, they're working with me. So that's a good thing too. So it's, I only know what I'm seeing, but what I'm seeing is very positive. I think it just takes a long time to get people, as you said, out of their comfort zones, understandably teachers are overwhelmed. What they do is incredible. And to ask them to do more things, it's kind of hard.
On the Horizon...
JY: What's on the musical horizon for you?
I think I'm in recovery right now. I just delivered two big pieces. I just delivered an electro-acoustic band piece that's also very visual as I like to do. It's got some physical elements to it. I just delivered a professional-level solo tuba electro-acoustic piece that I'm I'm very happy with and that will get premiered. It was commissioned by Gretchen Renshaw James and she is premiering it at the International Women's Brass Conference in Japan in MiTo, Japan in August. And at that point, I'm going to be sending it out into the world to a lot of tubists. And there were many commissioners on it as well. I'm proud of the piece because it is extremely cross-genre. It starts in one place, and goes to a totally different place that no one I think is expecting at all. And that makes me happy because it all makes sense motivically. Like it makes sense. And I even include an analysis of it just to sort of prove my point. But it is all over the map. Like I take material and I started in almost a 12-tone way. And then we go into a jazz ballad. And by the end, it sounds like, if Hans Zimmer were an Alex Shapiro fan or, this might be what a score would sound like. So that's what I'm doing and you know, it's, I have, you know, things ahead. But one of the things I have so many pieces in my catalog and I am the publisher and I have wonderful distributors like Hal Leonard and others.
But I am also taking a step back to give myself a little more space so I can continue to take care of all these babies I've launched out into the world. I've got a full-time assistant who's fabulous, Laura Crider and she's really great. So I want to kind of team up with her a little bit more in the next few months to make sure that the stuff that is out there, that people know about it. It's always a challenge because, with composers, we're always looking ahead, we're always writing the next piece. And when you're really in that zone, there is the right brain hemisphere and the left brain hemisphere. And they are very different places. And the trick, of course, especially if you are running your own business as I do, is to have them both talking to each other interchangeably in real time. But really when you're in the thick of writing a piece, it's very hard to shift gears. And so giving yourself time to just be in the admin world for a little bit while the ideas percolate for the next piece, that's a that's a good thing. Everybody needs space
Closing Thoughts
JY: We're getting toward the top of the hour, and so I just wanted to again say thanks. But before we do that before we wrap things up, do you have any closing thoughts or words of wisdom for teachers and or students?
AS: The main thing is don't be afraid and take risks. Don't think you have to do things the way you were taught. Don't think you have to do things the way they should be taught, consumed, or learned. If you're a student, the biggest joy in life is the unexpected, which is being open to good things happening when you haven't planned it all out and when you don't quite know what you're doing. I think we're in a society, at least in the West, that puts an awful lot of undue emphasis on success and being top of your game and goals and all of this. And I think it's quite out of whack.
I think it's exacerbated by what students see on social media because they see all the glamour and the glitz and all the things they should aspire to, right? And it's so damaging because it creates this sense of competition and wannabeism and a false ideal of what success is in the world. The mind has no bearing on a happy life or reality. And it's it's gotten much worse than social media. I mean, there's nothing wrong with social media per SE, but it can be very skewed depending on what you're surrounding yourself with on your feet. So anything that all of us can do to remind students that they are worthy as individuals that who they are and what they have to say, does matter, and that they have a voice that can also speak up for others. You don't have to be a certain age to be an activist to speak up to talk about things like let's say diversity or whatever. It starts immediately. If you have a thinking brain, your words are welcome and a treat. So there's that for the student side.
Photo by Liz Sanchez-Vegas on Unsplash
"If you're a student, the biggest joy in life is the unexpected"
And on the teacher's side, it's that same thing of don't hold up models of what success looks like when there is no model for success. My definition of success is personal happiness. And you are successful when you're doing what you love to do. We want to encourage students to find their passions, and their joys, and to pursue them, whether they choose to do them as amateurs, loving it but not making a living out of it, or as professionals. That's our job, is to help them find their passions and give them skill sets, you know, while they're doing that. But that's my advice. I don't know if it's worth the wisdom or not, but.
JY: My message to the listeners today, is if you haven't had the opportunity to read some of her material or to listen to some of Alex's work, it'll change your life. You need to spend some time on this, whether you're a band director, a choir director, a classroom music teacher, or teaching composition.
Alex has the foresight of looking at the future and paving the way for us to know what's what. We need to prepare for it to come. So please take the time and look at her stuff, look at her materials.
Alex, on behalf of many of us here in the music world and music education world, I want to say thank you. You're an inspiration. Continue to be and we look forward to hearing your future works. So keep it coming. Thank.
AS: Thank you so much and I so appreciate this conversation with a kindred spirit as you very much are, and it's just such a great conversation to have thank you so much for inviting me to share this with you. It's been a privilege. It's been an honor. Thanks for your inspiration.
Resources by Alex Shapiro:
- https://www.alexshapiro.org/
- Program Resources http://www.alexshapiro.org/ProgrammingResources.html
- Putting the E in Ensemble http://www.alexshapiro.org/Shapiro-E-ensemble_Syllabus.html
Some Questions for Reflective Thinking
Here are some personal reflective questions regarding the podcast with Alex Shapiro. Feel free to give these some thought. Your comments (below) and thoughts would be appreciated in the comment box below.
- Do you feel there is a distinction between being a conductor (of a student ensemble) and being a music teacher?
- How do you feel about offering students opportunities to create music without initial parameters?
- How are we teaching creativity? Note - See: Critical and Creative Thinking
Podcast on YouTube
Here is the complete Podcast on YouTube: