Classical Music For The Masses, With Andrew Shapiro

BY MEGHAN FARNSWORTH

On the upper balcony of the McDonald’s at 160 Broadway, something very surprising greets you: a grand piano. The piano is not just for display, either.  It is a platform of creativity for Brooklyn composer, Andrew Shapiro, to perform compositions every Sunday afternoon, and it is a job that has earned him the playful epithet, “Quarter Pounder with Keys.” With cash registers beeping, food wrappers crackling, and the hum of customers conversing, Shapiro’s music bridges the divide between art and life, scoring the composition of a fast food melody.

The Brooklyn-based Shapiro has been performing at this McDonald’s – not far from the heart of the Financial District – since 2004. Although he has only taken one piano lesson in his life, Shapiro sees his lack of formal piano training not as a weakness, but as simply informing and animating the way in which he composes his music, which is a stunning combination of the ambiance of minimalist music and the emerging culture that is becoming of Brooklyn.

As a student at the Oberlin College Conservatory, Shapiro felt creatively stuck and started listening to the music of Philip Glass during his senior year. Enamored by the composer’s oeuvre, Shapiro sought Oberlin alumni who were connected with the composer and landed an internship at the Looking Glass Studios in 1998.

“The experience was inspiring,” Shapiro said. “Here was a composer living in the real world and not the academic one I was aware of at Oberlin. I was fascinated by that.”

Shapiro received composition lessons from Glass himself, who taught him everything from experimenting with harmonic structures to “doing your own thing.”

“He told me to not to rush off to graduate school but to come to New York and pursue my own artistic endeavors,” said Shapiro, who followed Glass’s advice by sculpting an eclectic compositional style reminiscent of his favorite childhood musical icons — 80s New Wave artists Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, Culture Club, Men at Work, Squeeze, and A-ha — coupled with the minimalist structure of Glass’s music.

These self-described “synthy-artsy songs” were created “because I wanted to take the path outside of serialism and show who I truly was as an artist.”

Shapiro is not interested in the ceremony of classical music sophistication, which means he fit right in when he relocated to South Williamsburg in 2001. There, the grittiness of creative and almost anarchist freedom reigns supreme. Once, at a Los Angeles Steinway dealership at which he was to perform, Shapiro arrived in torn jeans, a seasoned pair of Vans (“a tried and true fashion of my neighborhood”), and a hoodie with a Depeche Mode patch. “The in-house piano tuner seemed slightly taken aback,” Shapiro recalled.

For his most recent album, “Intimate, Casual,” Shapiro recorded the entire work in his apartment on a muted upright piano instead of a professional studio. “I wouldn’t be able to do something like that in Manhattan,” he said. “In Brooklyn, though, I had the artistic freedom to conduct this project.”

The album is a work that recreates the experience of a memory. Each track contains a soft, bouncy lushness of sound that is almost ethereal. The muted piano is especially key to creating this sound because of the way in which each note rises and melts to the next, like rain droplets filling a lake. Ultimately, this effect conveys a type of fogginess, like the memory of a dream.

Coming out with around the same release date as this album was Shapiro’s self-produced “100 Houses: Gatsby Meets Caulfield.” Although the timing of both works was coincidental, they bear a common theme — the conveyance of memory.

In “100 Houses,” two prominent literary characters, Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby and Holden Caulfield of The Catcher and the Rye, unite to recount their past and to seek ways in which they could alter their mistakes. Shapiro said that he imagines this conversation by integrating lyrics with pop oriented melodies that soar over minimalist accompaniments, a la Philip Glass.

Shapiro is definitely a unique and coveted artist.  Shapiro’s “Detectors in the Eyes” has been featured on KCRW in LA, KEXP in Seattle, BBC Radio, and in numerous commercials and films. Even Alex Ross, the chief classical music critic of The New Yorker, said of him that “There’s an interesting subgroup of composers who sing their own songs, blending art song and pop [and] Andrew Shapiro is a notable practitioner.”

If a metaphor could truly come to life, it would be Shapiro playing every week at a McDonald’s in Manhattan – bringing his training at a high-brow musical institution to his performances in a low-brow environment where hearing live music is completely unexpected.

“I want my music to be accessible,” Shapiro says. “As an artist, I also want anyone who wants to contact me to be able to do so.”

Meghan Farnsworth is a freelance music journalist who has individually worked with the writers Alex Ross of the New Yorker, Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, John Rockwell of the New York Times, Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal, and Greg Sandow of the Village Voice. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in Musical Studies with an emphasis in music journalism and was a Writing Fellow in the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. She can be reached at meghanefarnsworth@gmail.com.