Harold Shapero

Shapero was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on April 29, 1920. He and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band. He was more interested in classical music. In his teens some of his teachers included Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936 and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he entered Harvard, where he became friends with Leonard Bernstein and studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938. Shapero was one of the first students at Tanglewood following its founding in the 1940s. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture. Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood that summer, but Hindemith ordered that no student compositions would be played that season. Aaron Copland hastily put together an orchestra to play student compositions, including Shapero's Overture. Shapero was awarded the Rome Prize in 1941 for his Nine-Minute Overture, which included a $1000 award. World War II prevented him from taking advantage of the residency in Italy the prize provided. At Harvard he held the Naumberg and Paine Fellowships. After graduating in 1941, Shapero undertook further studies with Nadia Boulanger at the Longy School of Music in 1942–43. While studying with her, Shapero was also in contact with Stravinsky, who was helpful in his critiques of Shapero's music. ==Postwar years==

Shapero's output was prolific in the 1940s and included three piano sonatas, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, and a variety of songs and works for chamber ensembles. His major work was the Symphony for Classical Orchestra, a 45-minute work in four movements. In 1946 Shapero won the Joseph H. Bearns Prize of US$1200 for a Symphony for String Orchestra. In 1946 he won the second annual George Gershwin Memorial Contest for his Serenade in D, which included a performance of one movement from the work at Carnegie Hall on February 13, 1946. The prize also included publication of the score with royalties and US$1000. It was the first time Shapero had a score published. Aaron Copland thought highly of Shapero's technical skill and the spontaneity of musical inspiration. Once, after being impressed with Shapero's Woodwind Quintet, he teased Leonard Bernstein, who was two years ahead of Shapero at Harvard with a note: "Look to your laurels! There may be another composer in your neighborhood!" In the 1940s Shapero was closely associated with fellow Piston students Arthur Berger and Irving Fine in a "Stravinsky school" of American composers—a phrase first coined by Copland. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946. He won the first of his two Fulbright Fellowships in 1948. His output fell off by the 1960s as his neo-classical style met increasing resistance, especially in academic music circles. He told an interviewer in 1986 that "Comfortable university life is a disaster, especially if you have a university that doesn’t pressure you to produce or perish. And I had a young child. I like home handicrafts and hobbies. I like gardening. I like photography. So it was only too easy to put off some of those hard operations like writing music". That same year, Brandeis University hired Shapero and he later became chairman of the department and founder of its electronic music studio with the day's most advanced synthesizers. He taught at Brandeis for 37 years. == Later years ==

When awarded his second Fulbright Fellowship in 1961, Shapero took the opportunity to travel to Europe with his family for a year. In 1971 he returned to Europe to be composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. In 1988, Shapero was forced to retire from Brandeis University. Encouraged by André Previn's interest in his work in the late 1980s, Shapero returned to composition. His late works included Three Hebrew Songs for Tenor, Piano and String Orchestra (1989) and, not long before his death, 24 Bagatelles for Piano. ==Analyses==

Symphony for Classical Orchestra. The instrumentation is largely classical with a few modern additions: woodwinds in pairs, plus piccolo and contrabassoon, pairs of horns and trumpets, three trombones, three timpani, and the standard complement of strings. Alan Rich called it "the greatest American symphony". While Shapero uses some modern notation in his scores, he employs only procedures that have already been established by other modern composers or that are derived from traditional notation. ==Compositions==

• String Trio (1937) • Five Poems of E. E. Cummings for baritone & piano (1938) • Trumpet Sonata (1940) • Nine-Minute Overture (1940) • String Quartet (1941) • Sonata for Piano, Four Hands (1941) • Violin Sonata (1942) • Three Amateur Sonatas (1944) • Serenade in D for String Orchestra (1945) • Variations in C minor for Piano (1947) • Symphony for Classical Orchestra (1947) • "The Traveler" Overture rev. as Sinfonia (1948) • Piano Sonata in F Minor (1948) • Credo for Orchestra (1955) • "On Green Mountain" for Jazz Ensemble (1957) • "Woodrow Wilson" Music for the television documentary (1959) • Partita in C for Piano and Small Orchestra (1960) • Hebrew Cantata for Mixed Chorus, Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone Soloists and Flute, Trumpet, Viola, Harp and Organ (1965?) • Three Hebrew Songs for Tenor, Piano & Strings (1988) • "In the Family" for Trombone and Flute (1991) • "Six for Five" for Wind Quintet (1995) • Trumpet Concerto (1995) • Serenade in D for String Quintet, arrangement of Serenade in D for String Orchestra (1998) • Whittier Songs for soprano, tenor, flute, cello & piano (2005–07) ==References==