Alex Shapiro

I am happy to uh, you know, make the Shapiros grow and grow and grow in society here. We have Shapiro squared.

A Shapiroi. [laughs] For...

Yeah. And hopefully... Well, in Hindemith's uh case, it was certainly artfully done. I mean, when you think about all the sonatas he wrote for every instrument, right?

Um, you know. Yeah.

I... Yeah, I I'm glad you brought that up because uh right now behind me, and we'll we'll talk about this a little bit, is a is a very sophisticated, four-movement symphony for not junior high kids, for uh, you know, adults [laughs] to play. Um but I am a really big believer that professional composers like you, and me, and all of our friends should be writing, just at the same time we're writing virtuosic pieces, we should be writing for absolute beginners and near beginners. We should be giving them wonderful material that will inspire them to keep playing their instruments, and furthermore, will give them an affinity to music playing and music making that, regardless that most of them are not going to become professional musicians when they get out of school, they will always care about music. They are our future concertgoers. Some of them, of course, are our future educators. Some of them are our future politicians. [laughs] And so it is so important for society, I think, that people like us provide for the earliest uh of repertoire and do it creatively because there's too much uncreative early stuff out there in the catalogs. I'll just be frank about that. There's too much stuff...

Oh my god. It's amazing that we still play the instruments, right? [laughs] And I I feel so strongly that kids, especially kids today who are bludgeoned with every media possible and they see everything all the time, right? They're not dumb. Even if they can only play five good notes on their instrument, they are considerably more sophisticated than that, you know, in terms of where they are in their lives and what they listen to, and what they're exposed to. So I think it is just absolutely incumbent on us to give them material that is sophisticated within the realm of what they can play. And, you know, I I have often said the New York Phil has done pieces, I am quite sure, that only have five notes in them, you know? Minimalist pieces or whatever. There... I will never believe it when when somebody, when a composer says, "Oh, writing for young people or beginner music is so hard because all the things they can't do." I don't buy it. Because my my attitude is look at all the things that they can do and all the different things that we can do to reach them if we just get outside of the box, you know, and think. Now I have a secret weapon, which is all this stuff behind me, the fact that most of my pieces are electro-acoustic.

No, published by me. Well, actually published by... Excuse me. No, I I made a mistake. It's it's neither. [laughs] It's published by American Composers Forum BandQuest and distributed by Hal Leonard, which is also my distributor for my Activist Music.

I I messed up there, too. [laughs]

Yeah, I think that's... Well, certainly when I'm writing for younger players. Here's the balance between the track and the and the and the uh instruments. Here are the two situations: mature players and non-mature players. [laughs] With the non-mature players, who are just starting out and figuring out, you know, which end of the instrument to blow through, they've just gotten that far...

Uh with them, the track is something that's going to make them sound better and hopefully it'll guide their intonation, for one thing, because of course they're still developing their embouchures and their strength and all of that. It will guide their sense of rhythm. I can put syncopations and other more sophisticated things in the track that I know that they can't quite read yet, while they can still play somewhat straight ahead with a little bit of syncopation, but they're learning the syncopation by hearing it and the whole thing comes together as one. Uh they get this cinematic... in the case of something like Paper Cut or whatever, some of these pieces, this... or pop song like Off the Edge is one that sounds kind of like a pop tune. Um they get these big, you know, cinematic kind of scope uh to to what they're playing with, and I think it makes them a little bit excited about being part of this. Plus, some of the pieces really lend themselves to multimedia and to visuals, like Paper Cut. Um and that makes that gives a whole another uh avenue of expression to these kids. Because you know, one of the one of the buzzwords these days uh is about giving kids agency, you know? Which kind of cracks me up. Because really, in in our day, you're there to learn. You're there to just listen and take it all in. But now, you... [laughs]

It's shut up, exactly! And and you know, I'm going to put you in detention if you talk. Now things are very different, all these many many years ago... me- years later. And um now, you know, I think we are in a different era where certainly being interactive and engaging students, finding ways to make them know that, yeah, you're still the boss [laughs] but their voice has worth, their voice is worthy.

Uh yeah, I love talking about this. In fact, I'm going to use the my the second part of my answer to...

This is good. [laughs] Then I'm going to uh um the second part of my answer to your previous question about um, you know, where I said it's a little different, you know, creating tracks for young people versus, you know, uh older people.

Um regarding what you just asked about the process, which I will talk about. When you're writing for older, more mature bands, at that point, the track truly is an additional and equal section in the live ensemble. So you have woodwinds and brass and strings and everybody, you know, everybody's got their own timbre and distinct texture, right?

And what I create here with the digital audio has its own very distinct texture that is not emulating any of the other sections, any other instrument. It is not there to step on the toes of any of the beauty of the actual live players or instruments. It's there to be yet an additional section. It's like magic. Like all these new instruments, anything that I hear in my head, I can create, which is the a great tribute to the technology and where it's come from since I started doing, you know, electronic music in 1977 when I was 15. And it was just a bunch of blips and blops and bloops, you know? It was uh we've come a long way. And...

For live instruments. And yeah, all it's the same as writing for violas and bassoons. You know, it's just a different, yeah, different vehicle for the sound, essentially.

Well, this is a program behind me called Digital Performer, okay, which uh is very for those of you who are familiar with DAWs, digital audio workstations. It's a lot like Logic, uh Pro Tools kind of use is all these. And then there are free versions like GarageBand if you have a Mac, and Audacity, which is cross-platform, and all these. But this is kind of the Ferrari of of them, and as you can see behind me, there's a lot of visual real estate in putting together these big pieces. And one of these mon- monitor... Well, they all pivot. But this one is vertical right now because wh- when you're working, you know, as with any score, you want to see all of your uh lines and everything having to do with the music at one time. Because uh I am writing the sounds most of the time. I'm writing the the accompaniment track and the live instruments at the same time, very much like sculpting. Uh I love this analogy, if you were to sculpt a bust, and you got your blob of clay, and you know, you work out the neck and you get out the blob, and then maybe you put out a little nose, and then you go down to the jaw. But then you go back to the nose, and then up to the forehead and back to the nose, right? It's not just, "Let's get the nose perfect and then move on to the jaw." Why? Because everything has to be in relation to everything else. So music and orchestration... And I think in that sense, it's very much like orchestrating uh any acoustic piece, any ac- acoustic orchestral work. I do it the same way. That you're sculpting it. You you hear the horn is going to come in here. The, you know, the bassoons are going to do this. The piccolo might do this little bit of color, and then there's a glock. And it's no different, you know, here, except I'm also adding another color, which is, you know, from the digital audio. And that's going to pick up the slack when I'm looking for a gesture, a timbre, a texture, something that I can't get out of the instruments. Or a registration, subsonic or extremely high, you know, the dogs will come running. Uh you know, when I'm looking for something, or the cats! [laughs] I'm when I'm looking for something that to to um create uh, you know, to fill up a certain part, but it's also a dance. It's not like the track has to go all the time anymore than musicians go all the time, right? Silence is part of music. And wh- where it's really different doing these for uh more sophisticated pieces like this one, is that I can... the track really does have its own voice and then calms down a lot sometimes and lets the the musicians just do their thing and it's more of a conversation. As opposed to with the younger players, the track is great for being a guide. So it might... It's it's not that it doubles them, but it bolsters them a lot while they're playing because they're 12 years old or 15 years old and it's helpful. You know? Um...

It's a different approach to to it. But... But all in all, I guess what excites me so much about this, and the way I do it is so it's a seamless blend. So that the audiences, most of the time, can't tell what are live sounds and what are digital sounds. And I do that very intentionally. And I if the volume is set... It's the track is played at the same volume as the ensemble, orchestra or band or whatever. Once that is there, it's mixed. I mix it to be and design it to be uh to be able to work in venues. I mean, I think the the um the trick for us doing this is that you never know what venue, you know, the stuff's being played in. Is it an auditorium or is it a gymnasium? [laughs] You know, I mean you you you're dealing with a lot of variables in terms of the sound. But ultimately, it's all designed so that the sound ge- triangulates from the stage out to the audience. Mm-hmm. You've got the two speakers on the on the lip of the space stage usually, not surround, you know, unfortunately. And then you've got your feathered out naturally stereo image of a large ensemble, 100 people on stage, whatever you have. Mm-hmm. And then it all goes out to the audience and they get the full effect of it.

Full score. I never write short score. [laughs] I I always work in the full... I want to see all the colors in front of me right away. Right away. I I... Yeah. And what I do when I start is actually the first thing I'll do before I start uh writing, because I know the the known quantity of the instruments, let's say if it's a symphonic wind band or something, I know what I got there. Um but then what I'll do is I spend a couple of weeks just pro- before I even start with that, programming the uh digital audio sounds that I want to use, including, you know, using samples that I often make from my phone. Um using samples and and working with those and figuring out a sound palette because every one of my pieces, I always challenge myself to never do the same thing twice. So everyone has its a different sound set um and because to me, it's more interesting artistically to keep challenging myself to grow, you know? [laughs] And and so I I spend a long time programming an initial set of sounds that I'm going to start off with that I think are going to set the mood for whatever I'm trying to communicate. Then what happens is that as the music starts to reveal itself, about a quarter of the way, third of the way through the piece, I realize, "Eh, I'm not going to use a third of these sounds," you know, away they go. And as the music reveals itself, I have to program new sounds to do what I need them to do musically. And additionally, one more thing I'll say about the process because I just think it's so cool. It's and this is why I'm always excited about telling everybody, "You, too, can be a composer!" If you've got a phone and a laptop, y- you know, the software is free. It doesn't cost a gazillions of dollars like it did in the '80s when I set up my first studio. And, you know, things have ch- changed so much. It's within reach of everybody. But what I do like, like I when I mentioned taking samples. In my pieces, uh not every one of them, but a lot of them, I work with trains, I work with whales, I work with ping pong balls, I work with rocks, paper, metal bowls... You name it! A ferry, the Washington State ferry is is in this piece. Um, you know, the and the amazing sound of the engine. Uh it's got a great syncopation. You name it, to me, everything is musical. What I'll do is I'll take the a sound, uh let's say a train sound. I've got a piece called Trains of Thought for for band. Mm-hmm. Where I started with those great clusters from the from the train horn going by and as well as the crossing bell, which I believe was on a C. And uh I will pull the pitches from these sounds as you to use as the source material for the entire piece. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's why s- it can sound organic as opposed to just random train sound and band, or and orchestra. It's um... Instead, I like with the whale, I've got a piece that some people know called Beneath, which is the third movement of my symphony, my first symphony for winds called Immersion. And I... The whole uh movement is written around a a a humpback whale song, a soloist.

Yeah. It's it's one of my favorites, too. And this will... This one is going to be be my next uh my next favorite, I think. But what I did with the whale, I wrote the whole piece around the whale. I didn't I I didn't even have to pitch-correct the whale, it was whale-tempered. So...

I had to pay it scale though to get it into the studio. [laughs]

This one is called Suspended. And it is uh four movements. Immersion is three movements. This one's a little bit more. And just very much like Immersion, each movement has been written to not only work very well with each other for a reason, you know, as in classical form, but also they stand alone as separate pieces as well and are going to be published as such as well. And because that I I find is a very wonderful way to get, you know, music heard is maybe not everybody has time on their program for a 30-minute piece, but they do have time for a 5 or a 10-minute piece. Well...

That's right.

The four movements of Suspended, um they will give away the kind of the theme. The first movement is called Airborne. The second movement is called Distanced. Right. The third movement is called Masked. Uh-huh. And the fourth movement is Viral.

Airborne, yes.

Only... There is no track. It... This is... Three of the four movements have a track, but Airborne does not. And the reason is because a composer always has to know when to leave well enough alone. And in this case, Airborne is a bat-out-of-hell movement. It starts very fast and furious, emphasis on furious. It's just screaming. And um it's chaotic, intentionally chaotic. It's very fast, quarter equals 160 triplets non-stop, relentless. And um just like something that might be airborne. And uh once I was, oh, easily a third of the way through it, I realized there was absolutely no place for a track. It didn't need it. It's thoroughly orchestrated and, you know, I... it's fine. So that one has no track at all. [laughs] There would be no way to keep a band with the track. And in... I've done in Immersion, the second movement of Immersion, Surface, is also very fast in 12/8, so kind of a triplet thing, too. And um very very fast as well. But the reason I could have a track with it is because the nature of the music was that a a very fluid, floating track underneath or soaring above the fast-moving uh band worked really well. And even if the band were to get off the track a little bit from it, it wouldn't matter. It's very forgiving. In this case, it's very different kind of music, and this music is really on top of it all the time. And I knew that even if I tried to put in a track, which it didn't need, if I tried to, I'd be asking for disaster [laughs] because you know, it it becomes like a sporting event, right? Like people are going to place a bet on who's going to end first, the band or the track, you know? It's like who's going to cross the finish line at the double bar first. I don't want that with this piece.

We want the conductor to survive and not keel over from exhaustion, you know, just trying to stress on that. So then the the second movement...

But isn't that why we do this, Michael? Isn't that why we compose is to shake people by the shoulders and say, "Feel this with me. I'm feeling this. I want you to feel it." And we're not expecting everybody to feel it, right? But for those who might feel it, it's like we're doing this together.

And there... Well, I I I look forward to you hearing hearing this because the demo isn't half bad, you know? But it will be performed, hopefully, live.

But it's better with acoustic, which I'll have, hopefully, COVID willing, uh in July. But um the Distanced, what I did, it's these block chords and, as you say, they're very heavy, they're very thick. They're very dense in color and texture.

Oh, constantly. Because it's floating all the time. But, and there's these big spaces. There's a lot of distance between these big chords. And what I... And the only way I'm using the track in this case is the track creates this sort of otherworldly ring-out of each chord. So the chord goes, they hold it for a measure and a half or whatever at a fairly slow tempo, I forget the marking. And then there's this kind of ghostly ring-out that continues for a few more seconds before the next chord. Mm-hmm. And...

Yeah, it's it's the ultimate laissez laissez vibrer for the entire uh orchestra or band. This piece, by the way, is going to uh be orchestrated as well. I think it will do very well for orchestra as well as band.

No, I did that with Beneath. Uh Beneath is for orchestra, too.

"Dance with me." And don't forget Masked! [laughs]

Yeah. I took the classical symphony, à la Papa Haydn, to heart. In terms of, the form of classical symphonies is fabulous. There's a reason that there are so many of them. I mean, he alone, what, 106? [laughs] He never tired of it. [laughs] Uh I think he wrote 106 of them. Uh but but whatever, who's counting? [laughs]

Yeah, really. But the um the the... I love I've always loved form. I've always, no matter what kind of music I'm writing, I love a tight motivic development, I love, you know, expounding on things. I like the way form works. And I think that no matter what kind of music we're writing, form is the glue that holds it together. And uh I decided, okay, so we'll go for the sonata form, of course, with the first movement. Second second movement is not so much form-based, but that lyrical, slow, you know, movement that that offers that, especially in contrast to the bat-out-of-hell opening. Then also, speaking of contrast, I... If I kept going with the... The music of the first two movements is deeply bleak. I mean, really angry and bleak. It's it's very difficult emotionally. It is. And it's it is um it means a great deal to me. I think it's some of my best writing. And I am actually happiest when I'm writing uh very depressive, melancholy music. That's where I live and breathe, actually. But I realized after I finished the second movement, if I don't like lift up [laughs] a little bit, you know, people are going to want to leave just and slit their wrists after this. This is not good. [laughs] You know, the point of a symphony is to take your audience on an on a journey, on a trip. Yep. And so I realized I have to rise up. So the perfect thing, and then the classicists knew this, the European classicists, that, yeah, a minuet and trio. A stately dance. It's a 3/4. It's about quarter equals 84 or something. It's not too fast. And it's a piece within a piece, because the, you know, you got the ternary form and then the mi- then the trio in the middle of it. It's so much fun! Plus, it's almost like painting by numbers, folks. Because once you do know that you're going to write a minuet and trio, you also know, okay, once I've come up with my A theme, it's going to come back here. Once I've come up with my B, my C, you know. In other words, it's building blocks. You know where everything's going to go.

Right, exactly. Exactly. And in in and this one definitely is a scherzo joke as well. It's a slow scherzo. It's not... It's a joke, not a not a fast scherzo. But this one I I use um ping pong balls [laughs] in... thus, the masked balls. I use them in a way that don't sound like ping pong balls at all. Um I take one of the coolest effects, and percussionists may know this, is to take an inverted cymbal, maybe a China cymbal that has a really good uh base, you know, the handle so it'll balance well, put it on top of a timpani, uh maybe depress the pedal back and forth while you drop a ping pong ball into the cymbal, and it goes round and round and it's hugely resonant. The other thing that I use in my whole trio section is truly demented. I have... I feature my uh mallet players and I have um what do I have? I've got glock um and uh a xylophone and vibes, Wow. all playing ping pong ball on one note at a time together, so they're creating these chords and this whole melody line with a second glock playing a ding ding kind of melody line along. It's co- It is... And not only is it cool sounding, as you can imagine, and I add to this in the track, but um I have I ask that they're put where the audience can see them, as opposed to buried in the back, Interesting. uh for for both acoustic reasons, because it's not the loudest sound in the world, and also because I just know the audience could use a good laugh, and watching this is going to be very charming. Especially if they use colored ping pong balls, this will be really fun. Oh my. So there's so there's that. Um because you have to lift up, right? And and and then my the final one is a real bop. Um I'm I'm finishing it right now. It's called Viral. And it is a rondo. So it's uh seven-part rondo: A B A C A D A. Done. And um I'm halfway through that and still have to come up with a good D. [laughs] And uh they all have to contrast, but then it ends it ends big. And really fun and um I pull up, you know, I pull up the mood.

Thank you.

I never unbooted. Um this has been the busiest year of my life. And I think it's because, to be honest, because of all this behind me, because of my understanding of tech, you know. I've been doing Zooms around the world, at the time they were really Skypes, for 10 years. I've been engaging with musicians around the world for 10 years, and so what that meant is that's for whatever reason, I understood what this format does badly and what it does well. When the virus hit, it hit um and closed things down in Washington State first. That's right. And um that's right. And so I got a call out of the blue from the director of bands at University of Washington, a great guy named Tim Salzman, who I didn't know, even though he's sort of 100 miles south of me, you know, in sort of my relative backyard. And he contacted me, called me up and he said, "It's mid-March. I have all these orchestra and band students. And they have to make it through the end of the semester, through mid-June or something. I don't know what to do with them. I I know that uh somehow I want to keep them connected to each other. Right. I want to keep them playing their instruments. And somehow," he said, "I think composing might be in there somewhere." Tim knew of my reputation with tech and with, you know, Skyping and Zooming and all of that, so he knew I would be a go-to person for this. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And I thought about it that night and I came up with a syllabus, on multiple pages of lesson plans and ideas for here's what we can do. Because as much as I also know what Zoom does not do well, I know what it does do well, and I decided let's play to the strengths of what we've got. Because we don't we're never going to have a have synchronous audio, right? So forget about that. They're not going to be playing together, give it up. And it was painful to watch people try to play together at first, not realizing, you know, these limitations. I came up with a syllabus that that splits these large ensembles into small groups of about six people each. And uh they are all tasked with coming up with, writing a 15-second motif. And playing it and recording it on their instrument at home, uploading that file, mm-hmm, and then downloading all the files the of the other five people, let's say, in their team, their sound team as it's called. Mm-hmm. I give them a drone, an A-flat undulating drone, or it's offered in any key, but let's say they've got this A-flat drone that's kind of interesting to listen to. Mm-hmm. It doesn't have any thirds, so it's not giving away major or minor or anything, it's just floating. And they are tasked with opening up Audacity or any kind of, you know, multi-track program, free program, laying in that drone and also all the 15-second droplets from the motifs from their uh uh teammates, and creating pieces of music with it. This ended up working phenomenally because what can you do with it? Your your your chopping up these motives, you're repeating them, you're putting them against each other, you're using the plug-ins to pitch shift them or put them through effects, and the stuff that all these uh students uh were doing was phenomenal. Not only did we do it at University of of Washington, UW as it's called, but I've now overseen it with about 30 schools around the country. Unbelievable. And the the creativity from these musicians who never thought they were composers is incredible. And Tim's group takes the cake because what they did was they actually uh after this was over, they made their digital recordings into live performances, videoed them, worked with the theater and and dance departments, and came up with six incredible videos that are linked to the uh e-ensemble page on my website, as a matter of fact, and you can see it on YouTube. It's the the amount of creativity has been stunning. So I think the the moral of the story is everybody is creative, everybody can compose and, by the way, don't let technology be a limitation, look at what it does well and use that aspect of it because collaborating online back and forth, or even in programs like BandLab or Soundtrap, where they can be working online on the in within the same programs, it's phenomenal what we can do. By the next pandemic, we'll have synchronous, you know, uh uh audio, and we'll have everybody will have a great internet connection thanks to, you know, the satellites. Oh my god. But right now we don't have it, so... So that was a great... That was a a bright spot in why, you know, when you asked me about rebooting, I never unbooted. I never took my boots off because I did that, I wrote a chapter in a book on diversity called, you know, The Horizon Leans Forward, which is a whole another discussion, Another discussion. and I produced a CD of my pi- of my solo piano music played beautifully by Adam Marks. So, That I have. Well, I like... What a year. [laughs] And wrote eight pieces. So it's been a crazy year. I'm looking forward to a nap. [laughs] I need a nap.

Thank you, my friend Michael. My uh brother from another mother. [laughs]

And father. [laughs]

I do. That's her place. [laughs]

Thank you, my friend Michael. This was great. This was delightful.