Award-Winning Composer David Shire to Teach Master Classes at SF State

Wednesday, March 06, 2019
Photo of David Shire and Steve Horowitz talking to each other
David Shire (left) and Music Lecturer Steve Horowitz. Photo courtesy of Steve Horowitz.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Horowitz had heard of Shire and seen Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film The Conversation, with a piano-only Shire score that helped create the film’s mystery, tension and melancholy. But it was the music of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three — the ’74 original, with Walter Matthau as the cop negotiating with murderous hijackers of a New York subway car — that turned Horowitz into a rabid fan.

“That was the score that lit me up,” says Horowitz, a bass-playing Berkeley High School grad who studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches at San Francisco State University, where Shire plans to be March 14 – 15 to give master classes, converse and perform his far-ranging music with SF State students and faculty.

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