Composer Alex Shapiro wrote Paper Cut with young musicians’ taste in mind and created a piece that is reminiscent of a movie soundtrack to which the players can imagine their own dramatic scene. Paper Cut is written to make the players themselves part of the action with choreographed maneuvers that look as compelling as they sound. In fact, the band members don’t even play their instruments until halfway into the piece – instead they “play” paper along with a prerecorded track!
Music isn’t just melody; it’s rhythm and texture as well. The unusual element of paper and the myriad sounds that can emerge from something so simple offers a fresh view of what music-making can be and opens everyone’s ears to the sonic possibilities found among everyday objects.
Although Paper Cut was composed with middle schoolers in mind, it’s also suited to more advanced musicians, since the paper techniques and the skill of playing against a prerecorded track are interesting for all ages.
Ms. Shapiro is delighted to introduce a new approach to concert wind band repertoire, and hopes that conductors and band members have as much fun with this piece as she had creating it.
Instrumentation
1-Conductor
1-Piccolo
6-Flute
2-Oboe
2-Bassoon
9-Bb Clarinet
1-Bb Bass Clarinet
4-Eb Alto Saxophone
2-Bb Tenor Saxophone
1-Eb Baritone Saxophone
3-Bb Trumpet 1
3-Bb Trumpet 2
4-F Horn
3-Trombone 1
3-Trombone 2
2-Baritone B.C.
2-Baritone T.C.
2-Tuba
1-Electric Bass
1-Vibraphone
1- Drum Set
1-Crash Cymbals
1-Snare Drum
1-Bass Drum
Meet The Composer
Composer Alex Shapiro (b. New York City, 1962) has built an unconventional life interweaving her dynamic musical career with avid pursuits of wildlife photography, non-fiction writing, and a devotion to advocacy for the arts, marine sciences, and social justice. Alex’s genre-blind acoustic and electroacoustic works are heard daily in concerts and broadcasts and can be found on over forty commercially released recordings from around the world. Sought after for her seamless melding of live and recorded sounds and multimedia, Alex is acclaimed for changing the landscape of the wind band field— and it all began with PAPER CUT!
Ms. Shapiro holds the Symphonic & Concert writer member seat on the Board of Directors of ASCAP, is an officer of the ASCAP Foundation, and also serves on the boards of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Music Publishers Association of the United States, representing her company, Activist Music LLC. Alex has also served on the boards of U.S. music organizations including The American Music Center, the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, The MacDowell Colony, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists.
Raised in Manhattan and educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, in 1983 Alex moved to Los Angeles and spent the first fifteen years of her professional life scoring for commercial media before switching her focus to concert music. She relocated to Washington State’s remote San Juan Island in 2007, and her images from home, as well as her music, can be experienced on her blog, www.notesfromthekelp.com and her website, www.alexshapiro.org.
About The Premiere
This piece was workshopped January to June 2010 with the Friday Harbor Middle School Band in Friday Harbor, WA under the direction of Janet Olsen.