Michael Jeffrey Shapiro

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

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Columbia College, Columbia University, the Mannes College of Music and the Juilliard School. He has worked with musicians and performers including Teresa Stratas, Janos Starker, Tim Fain, Matthew Kraemer, Jacob Schnitzer, Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, Jerry Junkin, John Corigliano, David Tanenbaum, Neil W. Levin, Kim Cattrall, Miah Persson, Clamma Dale, Katherine Ciesinski, Jan Swafford, Jerome Rose, Tomer Zvulun, Adam Abeshouse, Lara Downes, Hila Plitmann, Sangeeta Kaur, Grant Gershon, and Anita Darian. He has conducted, composed for or worked with organizations including the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Jewish Committee, the Hawthorne String Quartet, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Opera, the Atlanta Opera, the Theater Trier, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, the United States Navy Band, the West Point Band, the Royal Canadian Air Force Band, the Dallas Winds, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.

His exclusive publisher is Universal Edition.

Shapiro was for sixteen years the music director and conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra and has written a score for the 1931 film Frankenstein, which is in six versions for chamber orchestra, large orchestra, wind ensemble, opera, piano quintet, and organ solo.In 2024, he was nominated as a conductor for a Grammy Award for "Mythologies II" for "Best Classical Compendium."

Shapiro was music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has produced and performed in concerts by Jewish composers who had fled The Holocaust or had been murdered during it, and musicians imprisoned in Theresienstadt Ghetto. His oratorio, VOICES, is a setting of poetry and songs of Sephardic victims of the Holocaust and was premiered at Central Synagogue, New York City by Deborah Simpkin King conducting Ember Choral Arts and the American Modern Ensemble. Two movements of the oratorio were later performed by Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

His writing includes the book The Jewish 100, and research into klezmer music and into music in the plays of William Shakespeare.

In 1984, Tim Page, writing in The New York Times, described Shapiro as

a solid craftsman whose music, at its best, is marked by a direct expressivity that is often captivating. He has an ear for the English language, and three sets of terse, epigrammatic songs showed an unquestionable melodic gift. Mr. Shapiro writes in an idiom that might be characterized as gently dissonant, eschewing angular vocal leaps and bounds in favor of linear continuity.

Read more about this composer on Wikipedia.