Michael Jeffrey Shapiro

Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.

The son of a Klezmer band clarinetist, Michael Shapiro spent most of his high school years in Baldwin, a Long Island suburb, where he was a music student of Consuelo Elsa Clark, William Zurcher, and Rudolf Bosakowski.

The winner of several piano competitions during his youth, he earned his B.A. at Columbia College, Columbia University, where he majored in English literature and concentrated in music, benefiting most—according to his own assessment—from some of the department's stellar musicology faculty, He studied conducting independently with Carl Bamberger at the Mannes College of Music in New York and later with Harold Farberman at Bard College.

At The Juilliard School, where he earned his master's degree, he studied solfège with Renée Longy.

His composition teachers were Elie Siegmeister, Sir Malcolm Arnold, and Vincent Persichetti.

Shapiro is Laureate Conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra in New York’s Westchester County, which he conducted for the world premiere of his score for the classic 1931 film Frankenstein (directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff) (which has since its premiere received over sixty productions internationally including the West Coast premiere of its operatic version at the LA Opera and the East Coast premiere at the Atlanta Opera), as well as for the world premiere of his own orchestral work, Roller Coaster, which received its West Coast premiere under the baton of Marin Alsop in 2010 at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music while Shapiro was a composer in residence.

He served for two years as the music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he produced and performed music by a number of composers who were either murdered by the Germans and their collaborators or had survived as refugees from the Third Reich.

He has also been the assistant conductor at the Zurich Opera Studio.

He has conducted many orchestras including in the U.K. the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Michael Shapiro's exclusive publisher is Universal Edition Vienna.

Recordings include: