Alex Weiser is a composer with a “knack for crafting music that is at once historically rooted and of its moment” (The New Yorker). His work meditates on cultural inheritance, sanctity, and the transience of life, often drawing on Jewish history and Yiddish literature. Weiser’s unique musical voice – which has been praised as “compelling” (The New York Times), “deliciously wistful” (San Francisco Classical Voice), and “personal, expressive, and bold” (I Care If You Listen) – combines expansive phrases and a long-arched sense of time drawn from minimalist and post-minimalist traditions with a deeply expressive lyricism shaped by influences ranging from Gustav Mahler to Stephen Sondheim. His song cycle and all the days were purple was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music.

Weiser’s 2026-2027 season includes the US premiere of Tfiles for Clarinet and Orchestra, performed by clarinetist Andrzej Ciepliński with the American Composers Orchestra under conductor Kedrick Armstrong at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in October 2026. Ciepliński also gives the world premiere of a new clarinet quintet at Warsaw’s Trzy Cztery Festival in December 2026. In September 2026, Cantus and Imani Winds give the world premiere of My Ancestors Speak at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St. Paul, followed by performances on the two ensembles’ joint tour, including a date at the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison. In April 2027, Case Western Reserve University presents a concert performance of The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, and a recording of the opera follows in 2027. Weiser is at work on Objects and Ephemera, a piano trio written for the Merz Trio, and on an extended choral work, Luminous Steps, which will receive a rolling premiere.

Active as an opera composer, Weiser’s chamber opera The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, written with librettist Ben Kaplan, had its world premiere in September 2025, presented by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City with American Opera Projects. “Both meaningful and funny” (The New York Times), the opera is set in 1950s post-war New York and dramatizes the true, unfinished effort of linguist Yudel Mark to compile the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary – an effort of linguistic preservation and a memorial to the dead. Mark is haunted by three divine figures who compel him to breathe new life into Yiddish. Former New York Times music critic Vivien Schweitzer praised the work, writing: “The score, free of Klezmer clichés, features tuneful, Sondheim-esque arias interspersed with striking, harmonically pungent sections for the Alefs... It’s a taut, impactful chamber opera and I hope it’s performed again.”

Weiser is currently working with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann on Tevye’s Daughters, a commission from American Lyric Theater. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s iconic Yiddish stories, it explores the tragic death of Fiddler on the Roof patriarch Tevye’s lesser-known daughter, Shprintse. The opera also traces the lasting impact of Shprintse’s fate on her sisters as elderly immigrants living in New York.

Weiser’s other opera with Ben Kaplan, State of the Jews, was hailed as “stunning, heavenly, marvelous” by Israeli National Public Radio. Based on the life of Theodor Herzl, it juxtaposes a historical narrative focusing on the last year of Herzl’s life with the more intimate story of his conflicted relationship with his wife, Julie Herzl, and the toll his political views and activities took on their family life. The opera was featured in a series of preview performances at the 14th Street Y in December 2019 and a premiere production at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center in January 2025 in collaboration with American Opera Projects and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

February 2024 saw the premiere of Weiser’s clarinet concerto, Tfiles. Inspired by three Yiddish poems of Kadya Molodowsky, the concerto was commissioned by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews for clarinetist Andrzej Ciepliński and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Warsaw. Tfiles was characterized as “warm, intimate, emotional... well composed” (In Geveb), and a “great success – full of noble simplicity and warmth” (Polityka).

Other recent projects include Airs of Awe and Affection, premiered in summer 2026 in an arrangement for cello quintet at the Eastern Music Festival and in a version for bass quintet at the Appalachian Chamber Music Festival. In addition, Weiser’s song cycle based on poetry by Adelaide Crapsey, above the bulk of crashing water, was released on the album joy, too by Kristin Gornstein and Jeremy Chan in August 2024. He is also known for his collection of works inspired by David Vogel’s poem with gentle fingers – including a setting for singer and piano, a work for singer with a percussion quartet performing inside a piano, and a pair of works for cello and piano – and for Three Epitaphs, originally written for singer Kate Maroney and chamber orchestra Cantata Profana.

Weiser’s and all the days were purple (2017) sets to music Yiddish and English poetry. The world premiere recording, Weiser’s debut commercial release, features singer Eliza Bagg and was released by Cantaloupe Music in April 2019. The album has been praised as “ravishing” (The New Yorker), “reverent and magical... devastatingly beautiful” (American Record Guide), “gorgeous” (Tablet Magazine), and “utterly original and exquisitely unsettling... sweeping, bewitching, divinely dissonant... pitch-perfect” (In Geveb).

An EP released by Bright Shiny Things in September 2022 features Weiser’s water hollows stone, a multi-movement four-hand piano work written for HOCKET piano duo (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) alongside a solo piano postlude, fade. water hollows stone was extolled as “a compelling work” and “a very immersive disc” (The Whole Note), whose “considerable wealth of ideas and imagination” marks it as “an EP that qualifies as something more than a mere interim report” (Textura). Shimmer, an extended work for eight spatially arrayed cellos written for Ashley Bathgate, was released on Bathgate’s album 8-TRACK in July 2023. The work was praised as “lovely… bewitching… mesmerizing… flirts with ecstasy” (Textura), “...a beautiful and, well, shimmering textural haze” (The New York Times), “delicious” (The Arts Desk), and “...full of graceful and emotive song craft” (Take Effect).

Weiser’s second full-length album, in a dark blue night, was released by Cantaloupe Music in March 2024 and features two song cycles performed by singer Annie Rosen accompanied by an instrumental septet: in a dark blue night, which sets to music Yiddish poetry about New York City at night, and Coney Island Days, which explores the Jewish immigrant world of Coney Island in the 1930s and ’40s. in a dark blue night was lauded for its “beautiful evocation of New York” (All Music). The album was further described as “passionately rendered… a dark lustrous reverie… a beautiful ache... daring yet sensitive compositions…” (Culturedarm), depicting “wistful musical meditations on the sleepless city at night… a prayer” (Beyond the Music).

An energetic advocate for contemporary classical music and for the work of his peers, Weiser co-founded and directs Kettle Corn New Music, an “ever-enjoyable” and “engaging” concert series that “creates that ideal listening environment that so many institutions aim for: relaxed, yet allowing for concentration” (The New York Times), and was for nearly five years a director of the MATA Festival, “the city’s leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers” (The New Yorker).

Weiser is Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he curates and produces programs that combine a fascination and curiosity for historical context with an eye toward recognizing and celebrating influential Jewish contributions to the culture of today and tomorrow. At YIVO, Weiser has commissioned over fifteen works from some of today’s leading composers, as well as curating concerts to showcase their work.

Weiser is also active as a writer and speaker on music, culture, and Jewish history. His articles have appeared in publications including Smithsonian Folklife Magazine, Jewish Renaissance, New Music Box, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, and Musica Judaica. Weiser has appeared as a guest speaker at the Tenement Museum, Tablet Studios’ “Jewish Studies Unscrolled” podcast, the Yiddish Book Center’s “The Shmooze” podcast, UCLA’s Milken Center for American Jewish Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, Columbia University, NYU Steinhardt, Hunter College, Monash University, University of Sydney, the Allentown Symphony Composers Summer Workshop, the Charles Ives Music Festival, The Institute for Living Judaism, and elsewhere.

Weiser began his musical education in earnest while attending New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, writing pieces for his symphonic orchestra, studying theory and conducting with Joseph Tamosaitis, and studying composition with Paul Alan Levi. Weiser then continued his studies at Yale University and New York University, where teachers and mentors included Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Michael Klingbeil, Kathryn Alexander, Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Ingram Marshall, and Christopher Theofanidis.