Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro is an American composer and conductor best known to orchestra audiences for his score to the 1931 film Frankenstein, written to be played live by a full orchestra while the movie runs on screen. The original film had almost no music, so Shapiro's score supplies the atmosphere the picture never had. It has become a regular October booking for American orchestras, and it sits alongside a catalog of concert works that Shapiro has written across several decades.

The Frankenstein score is written for a full symphony orchestra and runs the length of the film, a little over an hour, so it behaves less like a set of cues and more like a continuous stretch of music with recurring ideas attached to the characters. Low strings and brass carry the monster, high strings and woodwinds the moments of panic and pursuit. Rhythms tend to be driving and motoric in the chase and laboratory scenes, then thin out to a single line or a held chord when the film goes quiet. The harmonic language is tonal but restless, closer to mid twentieth century American concert writing than to pastiche horror music. Because the score has to land with the picture, entrances are sudden and cutoffs are exact, which is much of the fun of hearing it live: the orchestra is visibly playing to the screen.