Alex Temple is a contemporary classical music composer and professor of music composition. Her pieces draw from multiple styles of both classical and popular music.
Behind the Wallpaper is a narrative song cycle, with music and lyrics by Temple. In 2023, the Spektral Quartet released a recording featuring singer Julia Holter. According to Spin Magazine, the narrative was inspired by Temple's gender transition as a trans woman, using surreal, dreamlike imagery to explore feelings of otherness.[1] The Wall Street Journal compared elements of the piece to Beethoven's “Pastorale” Symphony and David Ackles's American Gothic, with chromatic melodies and various contemporary techniques.[2] The poems use a second-person ("you") perspective.[3] Behind the Wallpaper contains cinematic elements reminiscent of horror films.[4] The New York Times described the horror elements of a 2015 performance of the song cycle as "surreal transformations and spooky situations: a character who has been swallowing seawater and live fish, another wandering a house where the walls keep shifting."[5]
In 2018, Temple's piece Three Principles of Noir premiered at Carnegie Hall alongside composer Valerie Coleman's Phenomenal Women[6] as part of a showcase of composers under the age of forty.[7] Three Principles of Noir features a time-travel narrative.[8]
Temple's piece Liebeslied was performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.[3] It includes surreal variations of 1940s–1950s love songs.[9]
Temple is a professor of music composition at Arizona State University.[3] She has a Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) from Northwestern University.[10]