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Standard Deviation, Wayne Alpern

WAYNE ALPERN is a New York City composer, arranger, and scholar who integrates popular and jazz idioms with classical techniques and repertoire to create a sophisticated contemporary style of cross-genre, or even post-genre music. After years of composing complex new music, he embraced his personal history and indigenous musical culture and fused them with his classical background and training. His work includes numerous jazz arrangements, string quartets, woodwind and brass quintets, mixed ensembles, pieces for string orchestra, and several piano works.

Alpern’s innovative compositions, recompositions, and rearrangements have been performed and recorded by distinguished artists from diverse musical traditions. A native of Detroit immersed in the Motown sound, he studied at Oberlin College, University of Michigan, Yale University, and City University of New York, with additional work at Harvard, Juilliard, Wesleyan, and University of Pennsylvania. His musical scholarship and theoretical expertise focuses on Schenkerian analysis and 20th-century music. He holds a law degree from Yale Law School and practiced civil litigation for nearly twenty years. He taught at Mannes College of Music, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Cardozo Law School, worked at General Music Publishing, United Artists Music Publishing, and was Steve Reich’s editor. He is President and owner of Henri Elkan Music Publishing, Inc. and a lifetime member of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society. He has lectured extensively in North America, Europe, and Russia. In his capacity as Founder and Director of the internationally acclaimed Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory, Alpern received the highly coveted Society for Music Theory Honorary Lifetime Membership Award recognizing his “substantial and longstanding accomplishments distinguishing the recipient and our discipline through his many good works on behalf of his fellow scholars and students of music theory for our collective benefit.”

Henri Elkan Music

Standard Deviation, Wayne Alpern

Hip, sophisticated, instrumental jazz arrangements by Wayne Alpern of contemporary rock, pop, and country songs originally performed by Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Journey, Temptations, Zombies, Four Seasons, Bobbie Gentry, Katy Perry, and Gotye.

Standard Deviation, the second album by composer/arranger Wayne Alpern, builds upon the critical success of his first release, Skeleton, and once again takes well-known contemporary popular songs and treats them as modern jazz standards for instrumental interpretation and arrangement utilizing sophisticated classical compositional techniques.

These are more in the nature of rearrangements than typical arrangements. They illustrate Alpern’s aesthetic credo of deviation from the norms of conventional musical categories and synthesizing them at a higher level of post-genre music. Without deviation, as Frank Zappa said, progress is impossible. Come take the leap.

Episode #223

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