Coming Soon

Dollylujah
With summer comes the return of Brooklyn's annual celebration of all things Dolly Parton hosted by The Bell House and presented by Doll Parts, Brooklyn's Premier Dolly Parton Cover Band. Join our ever-growing pilgrimage to the altar of Dolly and celebrate with a community of like-minded Dolly lovers, all of your favorite songs (with a horn section!) and burlesque by Corvette LeFace and Ginger Twist!
Tickets Here.

Right Now

Music Lessons
As a music teacher I've taught at the Seattle Center Academy, Groundwork in East New York, NYC Guitar School where I wrote a number of curriculums in piano, guitar, songwriting and ukulele and, most recently, Brooklyn College where I teach music theory to undergraduate students.

All in all, it's been over 20 years of teaching and hundereds of successful students. Are you next?

I am currently accepting students for the fall semester. Contact me to find out if I'm the right teacher for you!

Also, check out this hardcore jam from last semester featuring Ike and Casper!

June 2023

Permanent Moves
After years of development Julia Sirna-Frest and I will be releasing the songs from our Chekhovian song cycle - Don't Forget Us. For this and future projects we have chosen the name Permanent Moves.

Thank you to the North American Cultural Laboratory for our residency that month which helped us finally decide.

First tracks in Sepetmeber!

June 2023

Master of Music
Further proof that if you just keep doing something, even very slowly, it gets done!

I'm so grateful to have been able to spend these years studying at Brooklyn College as a student, a teacher and the program coodinator for the composers concerts getting both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

May 2023

Ash from the Trees
An unlikely quartet for Vibraphone, Celesta, Synth and affected Violin inspired by the Mt. St. Helen's Eruption of 1980.

This was also the final performance of my Master's Degree at Brooklyn College.

Check out the video from the performance and full program notes here.

Feb 2023

Doll Parts Heartbreak
Have you known heartbreak? Have you felt the devastation of unrequited love? Dolly can heal the injustices of your life and make you feel again!

Heartbreak is our annual Valentines-themed show - two years running! Yes, I'm in a Dolly Parton Cover Band and it is as fun as it sounds.

Dec 2022

Sociophonic
This piece was one of a series of experiments in sound generation for the Intermational Electro Acoustic Music Festival. This is the rehearsal version.

Oct
2022

Twenty-Five
Lemonade napkins blue rubber gloves

May 2022

Cleopatra Boy
This opportunity to work with the Detroit makers of theater - A Host of People, gave me a great reason to explore vintage synthesizer sounds as vehicles for golden-age-of-cinema-style scoring.

From AHOP - "Cleopatra Boy brings to light how women (and other non-straight/white/male) leaders’ histories are re-written, maligned, or erased. The iconic Egyptian pharaoh’s historic, mythic, and fictional representations across time inspired our ensemble to create a performance that speaks to the present moment."

Jan 2022

Fisher Center at Bard
Julia Sirna-Frest and I were really excited for the chance to head up to the beautiful performance spaces at Bard College and futher develop music for Daaimah Mubashshir's play Emily Black is a Total Gift.

Oct 2021

You Deserve to Be Here
Painted on the side of a dumpster in the middle of white sands - it’s good news for some people. Not everyone though. Watch the video here.

Nov 2020

Paint Her Eyes Seasick
"Everyone needs some time with their neighbors." That's what the five year old girl from apartment 3 says. To that end, this was written specifically to be performed by the people in my apartment building. The text, provided by the aforementioned little girl, explores the chilly solitude of post-covid life, while embracing the wonders of the natural world and finding comfort in community.

Those were the program notes when this was presented at one of the early-pandemic online concerts at Brooklyn College.
Listen to the recording here.

July 2020

Down the Yellow Brick Pod
Composing the theme music for this great podcast was a really fun project. Emily Kay Shrader and Tara Tagliagerro are still at it as of this website update. Find the latest episode here. You can watch my process for the music here.

Oct 2019

Saturn Radio
Pioneer - 1979 - The ghost ship - first to head out into the void. Plagued with mechanical problems, a fading light farther and farther from home. This recording (of the second movement) is performed by the Brooklyn College Percussion Ensemble.

June 2019

Silent Forests
"SILENT FORESTS is an intimate, character-driven portrait of activists who are fighting to stop forest elephant poaching and other endangered species trafficking in Africa's Congo Basin."

I scored this film in close collaboration with the director, Mariah Wilson and it was one of the most rewarding (and labor intensive) projects I've worked on to date.

Since then, it has been screened at dozens of festivals all over the world and won some impressive awards.

Learn more at SilentForests.com.

May 2019

Modulus of Elasticity
The modulus of elasticity is the spectrum engineers use to denote the strength of materials as they undergo different loading conditions. There are five loading conditions - tension (stretching), compressions (squishing), flexure (bending), shear (a kind of horizontal pressure along the surface) and torsion (twisting). This quartet applies the musical equivalent of these conditions (as I've interpreted them) on the melodic and harmonic content in a kind of test of its structural integrity.

Listen to the recording with the Xanthoria Quartet here.

Atlantic for 32 Guitars
When the Brooklyn Composers Collective asked for venue suggestions at the beginning of the semester I suggested the Brooklyn Guitar School where I was the director for five years. Within days they had set up a date and solicited compositions for guitar works. A few meetings later I discovered that because of the difficulty of the pieces, they would all be performed by either teachers at the school or the composers themselves. Hoping to bring in some of the students, I set out to write a piece in four parts for beginners - as many students as we had guitars. I assumed the student read no music and wrote each part successively harder (the first being for someone who barely played guitar at all). I made an instructional video and included audio links for people to practice along. Like the Atlantic, it was meant to be accessible to everyone in NYC.

The Kaddish Millet '48 Composition
Award for Songwriting
After a busy semester at Brooklyn College I got some exciting recognition. This award honors students who evidence a special talent in songwriting. An award winning songwriter, that's me.

105A-R
This piece for solo piano was written in a few rainy afternoons and performed at the brand new performing arts center at Brooklyn College. It employs some of the impressionist styles that undergraduates often study. Starting in A minor and ending up in Eb, it's a story about coming home to find that home is not what it used to be.

April 2019

Welcome to the Gunshow:
A Chekhovian Song Cycle
Directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton)
After a successful run at Target Margin Theater setting text from Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh to music Julia Sirna-Frest and I turned our attention to Chekhov. Welcome to the Gunshow was workshopped at La Mamma in January 2017, Premiered at Antfest in June 2017 and was included in The Exponential Festival in 2018. It's most recent performance was at City Winery as part of The 9th Annual Chekhov Variety Show.

Dec 2018

Songs of Love Foundation
The Songs of Love Foundation is a national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that creates free, personalized, original songs to uplift children and teens currently facing tough medical, physical or emotional challenges.

They let me write a song for them. Find out how you can help here.

Oct 2018

Song Cycle for Oliver Sacks
Directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton)
Julia Sirna-Frest and I started writing song cycles from the text of plays in 2016 when Target Margin Theater assigned each of the four acts of Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh to different groups to perform with “use the text” as the only hard directive. For us that turned into a song for each of the 15 characters using lines from their dialogues. In 2017 we produced Welcome to the Gunshow: A Chekhovian Song Cycle for an 11 piece band and now in 2018 it’s a four movement work featuring text from and inspired by the works of famed neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. The movements are divided, like the The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, into the subcategories of neuroscience. In this work we explore the connections to other humans that stay with us forever even in the absence of self. Song Cycle for Oliver Sacks was directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton) and supported by a residency at the Bushwick Star. It also featured Brian Lawlor on synths.

Emily Black is a Total Gift
This was the time we workshoped two new plays in the same week. A few days before our Oliver Sacks workshop, Julia Sirna-Frest and I premiered four new songs for this workshop from New Georges Theater, written by Daaimah Mubashshir and directed by Tara Ahmadinejad.

June 2018

New Cartography
The Brooklyn Bridge or the Panama Canal; any number of engineering wonders are examples of people not accepting the world the way it is and making a decision to change it. Often against overwhelming odds we remake the world.

We make the same kinds of choices in our everyday lives. Do we accept what is, or do we try to bend our stories in a way that leads to the endings we spend our days dreaming about?

Cartography is the practice of looking at the world and making your map. "New Cartography" is about looking at your map and making the world.

The album was recorded at Mission Sound, mixed by Myles Turney, mastered by Dan Millice and features cover art by Cameron McCool

Nov 2017

Sing for Hope
These guys bring the healing power of the arts directly into healthcare settings throughout the city each week at hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and treatment centers. These are also the folks that put those crazy pianos all over the city every summer. This was the month I first signed up in 2017. Ever since I get to go into hospitals and play guitar and piano all over the city. You should too. Check it out here.

June 2016

The Iceman Cometh
"Target Margin Theater present the ICEMAN Lab, our radical new approach to The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill, with four diverse theater artists each tackling a separate act of the play. This fresh take on O’Neill’s classic will allow audiences to see each act as a separate experiment, all four together as a unified whole, or both." This was the first creative task that Julia Sirna-Frest and I shared. In just a few weeks we co-wrote an album of songs together using text from the first act.

"As audience members took a shot with a character’s name on it, the band launched into songs that ranged from hardcore rock to indie ballad to cheery duet and a lot of things in between. As I nodded my head along to the music, I found myself really wishing that Sirna-Frest would transform more plays in this fashion, and I began to imagine what that might sound like." Bess Rowen, Huffington Post. She goes on to write an entire song in the review featuring lines like "Fourteen original songs from Chapman and Sirna-Frest, Make this Act I, in my opinion, better than the rest"

April 2015

Tempus Fugitive
The new album from The Peter Ulrich Collaboration - the second album in the trilogy which brilliantly follows up ""The Painted Caravan"", an album RollingStone.com praised as ""an unexpectedly rich and song filled showcase"" and a record which Popdose lauded as a ""riveting and intriguing album"". Collaboration leader and renowned percussionist Peter Ulrich performed with the iconic Dead Can Dance and contributed to the legendary UK supergroup collaboration This Mortal Coil.

Featuring this guy on lead vocals - track 1.

Feb 2015

Comfort Dogs
"Here, the notion of integrating dog and human performers is terrific, and the canine songs — composed by Shane Chapman in shambling roots-rock style and played by the cast — are groovy." Alexis Soloski, New York Times

April 2014

anacortes
anacortes is a journey that explores the gray lines of disaster and disease, and the peace that follows the loss of expectations. Musically, for songwriter Shane Chapman, it has been an experiment to write music without any tricks to hide behind; just two guitars, a bass, and some drums. “You can play these songs on a ukulele if you want,” says Chapman. “They’re simple stories.”

The debut speaks to and is inspired by the albums that Chapman grew up listening to, music from the ‘90s Northwest grunge-scene as well as ‘70s artists discovered in his father’s record collections. The first track on the album and unofficial single, a Great Unknown, is inspired by the quiet streets of NYC during a major snow storm. It receives radio airplay in Chapman’s hometown of Anacortes, Wash., and in small towns across Alaska, very fitting considering the song’s video was shot in frozen Prospect Park during a polar vortex swell with temperatures 5 to 10 below zero.