CHRONICLE
by Alex Shapiro

Premiere performance, August 16, 2024
International Women’s Brass Conference
Mito City, Japan

Gretchen Renshaw, tuba


“Chronicle" is an electroacoustic journey for solo tuba
commissioned by Gretchen Renshaw, 
and supported by an Odyssey Professorship at Hendrix College.

For more information about Gretchen Renshaw:
www.gretchenrenshaw.com

For more information about Alex Shapiro:
www.alexshapiro.org

Program note:

Our lives are ongoing collections of emotions. Some remain close to the surface as years pass, obvious and, for better and sometimes for worse, easy to trace. Other parts of our personal history fade to nearly imperceptible ghosts of memories. Shards of past events arise at unexpected moments; if we squint, their reflection catches the light. If we dare, we look closer.

A piece of music is the same as one's lifetime: as it moves forward, it carries the forensic evidence of its origins. CHRONICLE revisits its initial lyrical statements in unexpected ways. We cannot change our history, but we can alter our perception of it.

Chronicle

CHRONICLE - Alex Shapiro

Featuring his first cello concerto two beautiful, elegiac works for solo oboe and strings and solo violin and strings and the powerful Cascade-Concerto for Orchestra, Knehans—Concertos is a disc for anyone who enjoys beautiful, energetic orchestral music. 

Amazon

Drift

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 is a throbbing pulse of life; add to this four human voices, and it's a choir of plasma, looking for life to begin.

Note by Alex Shapiro

--
Stranded Silver
Mary Gheen, Willie Santiago, Benjamin Sledge, and Jackie Traish, flutes

Follow us!
https://www.facebook.com/strandedsilver
http://www.strandedsilver.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UComx2nqN5X1wIcKtTaxecQA
https://www.reverbnation.com/strandedsilver

Alex Shapiro - Bioplasm

Sounds recorded during the Perseid meteor shower from 0300 to 0500 on August 12, 2016.

Night Sounds 160812 August Blog

Alex Shapiro - Desert Notes (2001) for oboe, bassoon and piano

Performed LIVE at Palacio de Congresos, Granada, Spain at the 2019 International Double Reed Society conference.

Dr. Casey Knowlton, oboe
Dr. Jacob Goforth, bassoon
Dr. Galen Dean Peiskee, Jr., piano

Alex Shapiro - Desert Notes (2001)

Of the many, many people named Alex Shapiro out there, I am most likely the only one who composes chamber and electroacoustic wind band music AND who used to breed pythons. Others may claim to have done one, but not both.

Music. Nature. Laughing. Eating well. Friendships. And lots of other fun stuff, too. In no particular order. Unlike the music I compose, the notes of which are definitely in a particular order. If you want to know more about my life as a composer, please visit http://www.alexshapiro.org . And if you want to know where all these notes really come from, please click: http://www.notesfromthekelp.com . Thanks!


CHRONICLE - Alex Shapiro

Alex Shapiro composer

Related tracks