Alex Weiser
Alex Weiser is a composer with a “knack for crafting music that is at once historically rooted and of its moment” (The New Yorker). His work meditates on cultural inheritance, sanctity, and the transience of life. Weiser’s unique musical voice — which has been praised as “compelling” (The New York Times), “deliciously wistful” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “personal, expressive, and bold” (I Care If You Listen) — combines expansive phrases and a long-arched sense of time drawn from minimalist and post-minimalist traditions, with a deeply expressive lyricism shaped by influences ranging from Gustav Mahler to Stephen Sondheim. Often drawing on Jewish history and Yiddish literature, Weiser’s debut album, and all the days were purple, sets to music Yiddish and English poetry. Named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music, it features singer Eliza Bagg and was released by Cantaloupe Music in April 2019. and all the days were purple has been praised as “ravishing” (The New Yorker), “reverent and magical... devastatingly beautiful” (American Record Guide), “gorgeous” (Tablet Magazine), and “utterly original and exquisitely unsettling... sweeping, bewitching, divinely dissonant... pitch-perfect.” (In Geveb).
February 2024 saw the premiere of a clarinet concerto called Tfiles. Inspired by three Yiddish poems of Kadya Molodowsky, the concerto was commissioned by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews for clarinetist Andrzej Ciepliński and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Warsaw. Tfiles was characterized as “warm, intimate, emotional... well composed” (In Geveb), and a “great success — full of noble simplicity and warmth.” (Polityka). Ciepliński will perform the American premiere of Tfiles at Carnegie Hall on October 27, 2026 with the American Composers Orchestra under the baton of Kedrick Armstrong.
