Michael Jeffrey Shapiro

Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.

Michael Shapiro
Michael Shapiro 2002
Background information
Genres	Classical music
Occupations	Composer, conductor, pianist
Website	www.michaelshapiro.com

The son of a Klezmer band clarinetist, Michael Shapiro spent most of his high school years in Baldwin, a Long Island suburb, where he was a music student of Consuelo Elsa Clark, William Zurcher, and Rudolf Bosakowski. The winner of several piano competitions during his youth, he earned his B.A. at Columbia College, Columbia University, where he majored in English literature and concentrated in music, benefiting most—according to his own assessment—from some of the department's stellar musicology faculty, which, at that time, included such international luminaries as Paul Henry Lang, Denis Stevens, Joel Newman, and others. He studied conducting independently with Carl Bamberger at the Mannes College of Music in New York and later with Harold Farberman at Bard College. At The Juilliard School, where he earned his master's degree, he studied solfège and score reading with the renowned Mme. Renée Longy—known to generations of Juilliard students as “the infamous madame of dictation” for her rigorous demands and classic pedagogic methods—and composition with Vincent Persichetti. His most influential composition teacher, however, was Elie Siegmeister, with whom he studied privately.

Shapiro is Laureate Conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra in New York’s Westchester County, which he conducted for the world premiere of his score for the classic 1931 film Frankenstein (directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff) (which has since its premiere received over fifty productions internationally including the premiere of its operatic version at the LA Opera) as well as for the world premiere of his own orchestral work, Roller Coaster, which received its West Coast premiere under the baton of Marin Alsop in 2010 at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music while Shapiro was a composer in residence. He served for two years as the music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he produced and performed music by a number of composers who were either murdered by the Germans and their collaborators or had survived as refugees from the Third Reich. He has also been the assistant conductor at the Zurich Opera Studio.

Shapiro’s works, which span across all media, have been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, with broadcasts of premieres on the British Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Radio Television Ireland, Polskie Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Fine Music Radio South Africa, SiriusXM Symphony Hall Living American and Vincent Caruso's Classics on Film, and WCBS-TV. His music has been characterized in a New York Times review as “possessing a rare melodic gift.” His oeuvre includes more than one hundred works for solo voice, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus, orchestra, as well as for opera, film, and television.

Shapiro has received awards and grants from Martha Baird Rockefeller Composer's Assistance, Meet the Composer, the Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship of Columbia University, and the Boris Koutzen Memorial Fund. He has also received the Columbian Award and the Sigma Alpha Iota Composers Competition prize. He is the author of the novel Getting In, and two non-fiction books about Jewish culture and history, Jewish Pride and The Jewish 100, which has been published in British, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Polish, and Romanian editions—in addition to its original American release.

Shapiro has collaborated with such artists as Teresa Stratas, Jose Ferrer, Janos Starker, Sir Malcolm Arnold with whom Shapiro studied briefly, John Corigliano, Marin Alsop, Paul Shaffer, Grant Gershon, Sergiu Comissiona, Jerry Junkin, Eugene Drucker, Brad Lubman, Kim Cattrall, Tim Fain, Lara Downes, Gottfried Wagner, Alexis Cole, Edward Arron, Jerome Rose, Mariko Anraku, Steven Beck, Elliott Forrest, Ariadne Greif, Deborah Simpkin King, Daniel Mutlu, Matthew Kraemer, John Fullam, Jose Ramos Santana, Clamma Dale, Anita Darian, Megan Moore, Gregory Feldmann, Florence Levitt, Nina Berman, Kikuei Ikeda, Ayako Yoshida, Harris Poor, John Edward Niles, David Leibowitz, Robert Tomaro, Kathryn Amyotte, James Allen Anderson, Sarah McKoin, Albert Nguyen, Captain Kenneth Collins, Lawrence Golan, Jeffery Meyer, David Kehler, Kevin Suetterlin, Matthias Elmer, Andrey Litvinenko, Nadya Potemkina, Jeffrey Boeckman, Carter Biggars, Daniel Kocurek, Alexandra Guerin, Christopher Lee Morehouse, Glen Hemberger, Anthony LaGruth, Matthew Thomas Troy, Daniel Belongia, and Emily Wong, and organizations such as the Los Angeles Opera, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Los Angeles Master Chorale, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, United States Navy Band, West Point Band's The Jazz Knights, Dallas Winds, Orquesta Sinfonica de Puerto Rico, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Traverse Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonisches Orchester der Stadt Trier, New York Repertory Orchestra, Remix Ensemble at the Casa da Musica, Strings Music Festival, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, York Symphony Orchestra, Yakima Symphony Orchestra, Beloit-Janesville Symphony, Dragefjetts Musikkorps, Royal Canadian Air Force Band, St. Petersburg (Russia) Chamber Philharmonic, Garden State Philharmonic, Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, Piedmont Wind Symphony, Ember Choral Arts, American Modern Ensemble, Westchester Concert Singers, International Opera Center at the Zurich Opera, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Jewish Committee, Hawthorne String Quartet, Locrian Chamber Ensemble, Amernet String Quartet, Artemis, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Bergen International Festival, Central Synagogue (Manhattan), Temple Shaaray Tefila of Northern Westchester, and Dateline NBC, and universities in New York, Louisiana, Ohio, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Texas, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Oregon, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Indiana, and Tennessee.