Kathryn Alexander
Alexander is a 2006 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also won a Radcliffe Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a Composer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Texas native, 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 at The Institute she began to compose. In pursuit of her composition studies, Alexander worked with Donald Erb and Eugene O’Brien at The Institute and later earned her DMA in composition at the Eastman School of Music, studying with Samuel Adler, Barbara Kolb, Allan Schindler and Joseph Schwantner, and did additional study with Leon Kirchner at the Tanglewood Music Center. She is currently Associate Professor of Music at Yale University and has also taught at the University of Oregon, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Dartmouth College.
Alexander’s interests go beyond the traditional boundaries of music. She draws upon a variety of disciplines, including literature, the visual and plastic arts, the sciences and technology to develop formal schemes both for her acoustic and electronic works. The result is a varied repertoire of solo, chamber and large-scale works 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.”
Alexander’s commissions include the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, Vermont Chamber Music Conference, the New Music Consort, The Woman’s Philharmonic, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the Old Stone Singers, Boston Musica Viva, and the National Flute Association, among others. She has won annual Special Awards from ASCAP and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Alexander’s music has been performed throughout North and South America and Western Europe.
- From the Faraway Nearby (2004)