A sound can evoke a time, a place, a cultural moment, or a way of looking at the world. Alex Temple writes music that distorts and combines iconic sounds to create new meanings, often in service of surreal, cryptic or fantastical stories. In addition to performing her own works for voice and electronics at venues such as Roulette and Constellation Chicago, she has also collaborated with performers and ensembles such as Mellissa Hughes, Timothy Andres, the American Composers Orchestra, Fifth House Ensemble, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. Alex got her BA from Yale University in 2005 and her MA from the University of Michigan in 2007; she’s currently working on a DMA at Northwestern University and writing a podcast-opera about TV production company closing logos and the end of the world.
Articles by Alex Temple:
If we want our collaborations to be satisfying for everyone involved, we need to come up with ways of working together that explicitly address two related questions: what is each...
My articles for NewMusicBox have addressed borrowed material, relevance, and the politics of cross-cultural influence. For the last article in this series, I’d like to zoom in and talk about...
Discussions of cultural appropriation often frame the problem in one of two ways: in terms of cultural property or in terms of what composers are “allowed” to do. Both of...
Whenever I hear words like "relevant" or "important," I always want to ask, "relevant or important to whom?" While I do think the audience for classical music, and new music...
It seems to be taken for granted in many new music circles that anyone who composes in a European modernist idiom is doing so because they’ve thought about all the...
In the last few months, there have been a number of highly circulated articles about women and contemporary classical music. Reading all these articles got me thinking about the role...