In his teens some of his teachers included Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936 and Ernst Krenek in 1937.
Aaron Copland hastily put together an orchestra to play student compositions, including Shapero's Overture.
[2] Decades later, he told a New York Times interviewer that he was unaware while composing it of how lengthy it had become, that he "had wildly miscalculated my materials.
[7] In 1946 he won the second annual George Gershwin Memorial Contest for his Serenade in D,[8] which included a performance of one movement from the work at Carnegie Hall on February 13, 1946.
Aaron Copland thought highly of Shapero's technical skill and the spontaneity of musical inspiration.
"[6] But in a 1948 New York Times article, he wrote: "Stylistically, Shapero seems to feel a compulsion to fashion his music after some great model.
[9] In the 1940s Shapero was closely associated with fellow Piston students Arthur Berger and Irving Fine in a "Stravinsky school" of American composers—a phrase first coined by Copland.
[3] He was also grouped in the "Boston school" along with Arthur Berger, Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Alexeï Haieff, and Claudio Spies.
[12] That same year, Brandeis University hired Shapero and he later became chairman of the department and founder of its electronic music studio with the day's most advanced synthesizers.
[2] His notable students include John Adams, Gustav Ciamaga, Scott Wheeler, and Richard Wernick.
[2] When Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic played the local premiere of Shapero's Credo in 1958, a work commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, Harold Schonberg wrote: "The new Shapero work is in one movement, lasts about eight and a half minutes, ... a quiet and sensitive mood piece, harmonically rather conservative (a Copland type of conservatism, with strong echoes of Our Town), but unmistakably of this generation.
As in the Beethoven, the first of its four movements opens with an Adagio that shimmers with flickering colors and sustained harmonies, leading to a long, bustling, contrapuntal Allegro.
The second movement is a wistfully lyrical yet rhythmically restless Adagietto; then comes a misbehaving Scherzo, which hurtles toward the imposingly structured but spirited Finale.
The piece is essentially tonal, with the outer movements hewing to B flat; but the harmonic language contains elements of polytonality, and the music is spiky with dissonance, rhythmically shifty and utterly fresh.
It's the same quality that you hear in early Beethoven: "I'll show you, my revered teacher Haydn, how to write a piano sonata."
"[6]In the Los Angeles Times, Martin Bernheimer wrote of a 1986 performance of the Symphony that "Shapero reveals himself here as a superb craftsman, an artist totally in control of the grandiose variables at hand."
He called the writing "clever, subtle, elegant" and added that the symphony "isn't affecting in spite of the inherent anachronisms, but because of them".