Discipline: Music Composition

Kathryn Alexander

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Hamden, CT
MacDowell Fellowships: 1990
More: www.kathrynalexander.org
Composer Kathryn Alexander, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, has written a wide variety of works, both acoustic and technological. Her pieces draw upon a range of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, the sciences, and technology to develop formal schema that distill from the abstract rather than from literal, programmatic meaning. This interdisciplinary approach has culminated in an extensive array of compositions, ranging from pieces for solo instrument and chamber ensemble, solo voice and orchestra, to technological presentations and multimedia works. When Alexander engages music with the other arts, whether for dramatic or abstract expression, or as sonic sculpture, she seeks to highlight the processes of transformation and the beauty of change. The result is a varied repertoire of solo, chamber and large-scale compositions 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 extra-musical pursuits.”

Studios

Watson

Kathryn Alexander worked in the Watson studio.

Built in 1916 in memory of Regina Watson of Chicago, a musician and teacher, this studio was donated by a group of her friends, along with funds for its maintenance. Originally designed to serve as a composers’ studio with room for performance, Watson was used as a recital hall for chamber music for a…

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