Kathryn Alexander


Kathryn Alexander is a Guggenheim Award-winning American composer and a professor of composition at Yale University.

Early life and education

Alexander was born in Texas and was involved with music from an early age. She earned a bachelor's degree at Baylor University studying flute with Helen Ann Shanley, and went on to the Cleveland Institute of Music to study with Maurice Sharp. While at Cleveland, she began to compose. She sought guidance from Cleveland faculty Donald Erb and Eugene O'Brien, and went on to earn a DMA in composition at the Eastman School of Music, working with Samuel Adler, Barbara Kolb, Allan Schindler, and Joseph Schwantner. While at Eastman, she became one of the first women to teach in the Eastman Computer Music Center. She pursued additional study with Leon Kirchner at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Career

Alexander serves on the faculty of the Department of Music at Yale University, where she has taught composition and music technology since 1996. She is the founding director of the Yale Music and Technology Lab. She previously taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Dartmouth College, and the University of Oregon. An influential pedagogue, she has trained prominent rising composers such as Timo Andres and Wilbert Roget, II.
She composes both acoustic and electroacoustic music, for instrumental forces ranging from chamber ensemble to solo voice and orchestra to multimedia works. Her ensemble works have been performed by the JACK Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Argento Ensemble, the Blue Elm Trio, the Deering Estate Chamber Ensemble, Fifth House Ensemble, the NOW Ensemble, Williams Chamber Players, the Yale Camerata, and the Yale Percussion Group.
She co-founded contemporary music festival New Music on the Point in Vermont with Jenny Beck in 2011.

Awards and recognition

In 2018, Alexander won an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the recipient of a 2007-08 Aaron Copland Award and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009, she won the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship in Music and resided as Composer-in-Residence at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy. Other awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Computerworld Laureate Award from the Smithsonian Institution, a Composer's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rome Prize, as well as numerous ASCAP awards.

Selected musical works