Shire also co-fronted a jazz ensemble at Yale, the Shire-Fogg Quintet, and was a Phi Beta Kappa honors student, with a double major in English and music.

For the "Main Title" of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Shire set a jazz-funk groove in B-flat minor, and made the lead melodies and chords out of atonal twelve-tone rows in short bursts of variously shaped motives.

[3] His hundreds of scores for television include: Killer Bees; Raid on Entebbe; The Kennedys of Massachusetts; Serving In Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story; Christopher Reeve's Rear Window; Oprah Winfrey's The Women of Brewster Place; and The Heidi Chronicles.

As a pit pianist, Shire played for the original productions of both The Fantasticks and Funny Girl, eventually serving as Barbra Streisand's accompanist for several years.

He also intermittently conducted and arranged for her (most notably for her television specials Color Me Barbra and The Belle of Fourteenth Street), and over a period of several years she recorded five of his songs.

A new musical entitled Take Flight premiered in London at the Menier Chocolate Factory in July 2007, with a separate production in Tokyo in November 2007.

[4][5] A Stream of Voices, a one-act opera, with libretto by Gene Scheer, for the Colorado Children's Chorale, premiered in June 2008 in Denver.

[citation needed] Shire wrote and composed many songs for the hit PBS children's TV series Shining Time Station, which starred his wife Didi Conn along with comedian George Carlin.

[citation needed] Shire serves on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America and is a trustee of the Rockland Conservatory of Music and the Palisades (New York) Library.