The Contemporary Piano: A Performer and Composer's Guide to Techniques and Resources

Alan Shockley is the director of composition and theory and an associate professor in the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach. As a composer, he has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Italy's Centro Studi Ligure, and France's Centre d'Art Marnay Art Centre (CAMAC), among others, and he has received grants from the American Music Center, Pittsburgh ProArts, the Mellon, and the Heinz Foundations. A dedicated scholar and educator, Shockley has taught at Princeton University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Pittsburgh. Shockley's essays on and reviews of contemporary music and on intersections between music and modernist fiction can be found in journals and collections published by many major presses, and his book, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel was released in 2009.