Harold Shapero

Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Shapero and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band. More interested in classical music, though, in his teens he studied with quite some famous teachers, including Nicolas Slonimsky (e... more

Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Shapero and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band. More interested in classical music, though, in his teens he studied with quite some famous teachers, including Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936, and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he was ready to go to Harvard, where he studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938, and Paul Hindemith in 1940. Tanglewood, a now cherished musical institution, was founded in the 1940s, and Shapero was one of its first students. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture. Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood in the summer of that year, but Paul Hindemith... less