School of Music Visiting Artist
A sound can evoke a time, a place, a cultural moment, or a worldview. Alex Temple (b. 1983) writes music that distorts and combines iconic sounds to create new meanings, often in service of surreal, cryptic, or fantastical narratives. She’s particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds, playing with the boundary between funny and frightening, investigating lost memories and secret histories, and telling queer and trans stories.
In addition to performing her own works for voice and electronics, she has collaborated with performers and ensembles such as Mellissa Hughes, Julia Holter, Isabel Leonard, wild Up, Spektral Quartet, the American Composers Orchestra, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She has also played keyboards with the chamber-rock group The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles, and made sounds using her voice, synthesizers and household objects with a·pe·ri·od·ic.
Alex got her BA from Yale in 2005, and her MA from the University of Michigan in 2007. After leaving Ann Arbor, she spent two years working for the New York Youth Symphony’s Making Score program for young composers. In 2017 she completed a DMA at Northwestern, and she is now an Assistant Professor of Composition at Arizona State University.