Image Credit: Aleksander Karjaka (Karjaka Studios)
Alex Burtzos is an American composer, conductor, and educator based in New York City and Orlando, FL. His music has been performed across four continents by some of the world's foremost contemporary musicians and ensembles, including JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, loadbang, Contemporaneous, ETHEL, Jenny Lin, RighteousGIRLS, Decoda, and many others. Alex is the founder and artistic director of ICEBERG New Music, a New York-based composers' collective.
As a composer, Alex is committed to pursuing artistic expression unconstrained by boundaries of school or style. His work often incorporates elements of the 20th Century avant-garde, jazz, rock, metal, and hip-hop alongside or against classical/preclassical structures and sounds, justifying these juxtapositions with a great depth of musical ideas and extra-musical knowledge. Alex’s music takes as its basis and provides commentary on a diverse array of subject matter, from early colonial history to recent events, from Shakespeare’s tragedies to naughty text messages. His unique approach has earned him accolades and awards from organizations around the world.
As Artistic Director of ICEBERG New Music, Alex leads one of the most adventurous and dynamic composers’ collectives active today. Since 2016, the ten members of ICEBERG have produced dozens of concerts in NYC and engaged in educational outreach across North America and in Europe. ICEBERG’s debut album, with Pianist Jenny Lin, received praise from Gramophone and I Care If You Listen. ICEBERG awards scholarships to composition students from under-represented backgrounds and, in 2020, debuted a Summer composition Institute for young and emerging composers. Learn more here.
As a conductor, Alex exclusively performs contemporary repertoire, and has given over 40 world and regional premieres by emerging and established composers. From 2013-19, he conducted the NYC-based ensemble ShoutHouse, blending elements of jazz and classical conducting styles to cultivate a unified, engaging sound that's "incomparable to anything existing." Watch a video here.
Alex holds a DMA from Manhattan School of Music, where his primary teachers were Reiko Fueting and Mark Stambaugh. He is the Endowed Chair of Composition Studies at the University of Central Florida, where he teaches composition, orchestration, film scoring, video game scoring, and music technology. His music is published by Just a Theory Press, NewMusicShelf, and others.