Alex
Temple

My music lies somewhere between Surrealism and Pop Art. As someone who loves both the classical tradition and the world of pop culture, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with stylistic hierarchies and the idea of a pure musical language. I prefer to find points of connection between things that aren’t supposed to belong together, often to uncomfortable or disquieting effect. In the past few years, I’ve come to see my work as a kind of cultural archaeology and myth-making. A lot of my recent music uses appropriated musical and textual materials as icons which evoke clusters of associations — places, time periods, ideologies, worldviews — while distorting and recombining them in order to create new meanings. I’m particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds and telling stories of recovered memories and secret histories.

 

Bio

I was born in Northampton, MA and grew up around Boston. I got my BA from Yale in 2005 and my MA from the University of Michigan in 2007; my teachers have included John Heiss, Matthew Suttor, Erik Santos, Robert X. Rodriguez, Samuel Adler, Jay Alan Yim and Hans Thomalla. I’ve written music for dance and film, played keyboards in an indie bossa nova band, released two albums of genre-bendy electronic music on a microlabel that I ran out of my college dorm room, worked with young composers at the New York Youth Symphony, collaborated with the American Composers Orchestra, and put on solo voice-and-electronics shows at New York venues such as Galapagos Arts Space, Roulette, the Gershwin Hotel, and the Tank. Currently I live in Chicago, where I’m working on my DM at Northwestern University. In addition to composing and teaching, I also play synthesizer and melodica in Ben Hjertmann‘s avant-rock band The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles, and perform post-Cagean indeterminate music with Nomi Epstein‘s ensemble aperiodic.

 

A Note on Gender for Journalists

I’m a MTF-spectrum genderqueer person. What does that mean? It means that I don’t really identify with binary understandings of gender, but I feel more comfortable with female categories than with male categories. So if you happen to be reviewing a performance of one of my pieces, I would ask you to do the following:

1. Avoid using gendered pronouns in reference to me. You can usually do this pretty easily by simply repeating my name where you would otherwise use a pronoun.

2. If you absolutely have to put a title in front of my name, I prefer the gender-neutral “Mx. Temple.”

Thanks, journalists!

 

Contact

You can reach me at alextemplemusic@gmail.com.