About:
Kathryn Alexander is an American composer who has been the recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship, a Composer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Computerworld Laureate Award from the Smithsonian Institute, and various ASCAP awards. In addition, she has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony, The Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, American Opera Projects, the Vermont Chamber Music Festival of the East, the Culture/Rockefeller Exchange, the Words and Music Festival at Indiana University, June-in-Buffalo, and The Tanglewood Music Center. Alexander was a Co-Founder of the New Music on the Point Festival, where she served as Artistic and Program Director from 2010-2014.Performances and commissions include the JACK Quartet, The Aaron Copland Players, the Fromm Foundation Music Commissions, Hoff-Bartheslon Contemporary Music Festival, Southwest Chamber Music, counter)induction, the Williams Chamber Players, the Contemporary Music Forum, the NOW Ensemble, the Blue Elm Trio, the Yale Camerata and Pro Musica, the Interfaced Culture Conference, Trio Neos, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Women’s Philharmonic, The Center in San Diego, Future Music Oregon, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the California E.A.R. Unit, the National Flute Association, the New Music Consort, Contemporanea Musicali Internazionale, the Old Stone Singers, Boston Musica Viva, League-I.S.C.M., and First Monday Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, among others.
A native Texan, Alexander comes from a musical family where she found it natural to be involved with music from an early age. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at Baylor University as a flutist, studying with Helen Ann Shanley, and then went on to The Cleveland Institute of Music to work with Maurice Sharp, principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra. While there she began to compose. Alexander studied with Donald Erb and Eugene O’Brien at The Cleveland Institute of Music and later earned her DMA in composition at the Eastman School of Music, working with Samuel Adler, Barbara Kolb, Allan Schindler and Joseph Schwantner, and pursued additional study with Leon Kirchner at the Tanglewood Music Center. In addition to Yale, she has also taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1994/1987-1988), Dartmouth College (1990-1993) and the University of Oregon (1995-1996).
Her pieces draw upon a range of disciplines, including literature, the visual and plastic arts, the sciences, and technology to develop formal schema that distill from the abstract rather than from literal, programmatic meaning. This interdisciplinary approach has culminated in an extensive array of compositions, ranging from pieces for solo instrument and chamber ensemble, solo voice and orchestra, to technological presentations and multimedia works. When Alexander engages music with the other arts, whether for dramatic or abstract expression, or as sonic sculpture, she seeks to highlight the processes of transformation and the beauty of change. The result is a varied repertoire of solo, chamber and large-scale compositions described variously by critics as music in which “… the gestures were bolder, the moods more volatile, the climaxes more clearly marked and – most significant – the sounds enormously more colorful,” and where “… the instrumentalists out-Bartoked Bartok in their extramusical pursuits.”