Alec Steinhorn is a lifetime musician and a lifetime learner. Since beginning lessons at age seven, it's been hard to pull him away from the piano. With a Carnegie Hall performance as a winner of the Annual Russian Music Festival and Competition (2012) under his belt at a young age, Alec expanded into composition in high school, using an independent study his senior year to pen an original musical, Areoplane (2016), which he directed and put on as a capstone. 

At Northwestern University, Alec had 17 writing credits between his freshman and sophomore years for the 86th and 87th annual Waa-Mu Show, America's largest student-written musical. As a sophomore, he became Waa-Mu's first writing coordinator, a position continued to this day. His songs "Tell You/Hear You" and "Everything is Heard" (lyrics by Jordan Knitzer, 86th Annual Waa Mu Show) were selected for performance in Manhattan by the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2018 and 2019, respectively. "The Curtain Rises" (lyrics by Jordan Knitzer, 87th Annual Waa Mu Show) was also arranged for a special performance at Northwestern's Starry Night gala, hosted by Stephen Colbert.

Apart from composing for the Waa-Mu show, Alec has undertaken composition projects of varied range and scope in and out of college. His work on Fair Game: a Chicago Spectacle (written/dir. Eli Newell) in 2017 underscored an immersive retelling of the events which transpired at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and combines period influence with contemporary stylings in an 11-piece chamber instrumentation to make for a unique musical language. This past year, Alec and Eli joined forces again on The Roar on Rush Chicago (written/dir. Eli Newell), in which audience members are brought into a theatricalized speakeasy that combines elements of theatre, nightlife, cuisine and mixology. 

Alec's largest composition work to date is People You May Know (co-written with Katie Duggan and Jordan Knitzer), a new musical whose subject pertains to questions of sexual assault, hookup culture on college campuses, and the grey areas between victimhood and survivorship, agression and predation, and conditional versus unconditional familial love. The show, under development since 2017, recieved an Undergraduate Research Grant through Northwestern in 2019, and the Kennedy Center's KCACTF Musical Theatre award in 2020. It was produced as a staged reading through the American Musical Theatre Festival, also in 2020, which was notably the first time in the production company's history that they produced a work written by then-undergraduates.

His work as a composer has brought him into non-theatrical realms as well. His band, Stage Wombat Collective, formed in 2020 and played venues in Portland Oregon, performing original music which blends indie-rock with folk, soul, and a storytelling and quirky ethos. Stage Wombat Collective also scored a new webseries, Chill Girl (written by Jessie Vane, Julian Larach, and Samantha Casessa), which is receiving its premiere at NYC Web Fest in Miami Beach this November. Finally, you can hear Alec's work in the theme for Ripples on the Road, a vlog series produced by The Ripple Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded by Mike Chodroff whose aim is to provide fellows with a toolset for disrupting non-sustainable capitalist systems and engage in conscientious entrepreneurship.

While at school, Alec developed a repertoire of music direction credits, including Tick, Tick... Boom! (dir. Noah Watkins), Carrie: the Musical (dir. Annabel Heacock), and Sweeney Todd (dir. Taylor Stark). He was also the ongoing music director of the Bix, Northwestern's musical improv troupe, from 2018-2020. Outside of school, his music direction work continues as MD and accompanist of Pop the Holidays: Music with 'Shells Hoffman (written/dir. Nick Chase, Local Theater Company), a show running this November and December in Denver, CO. Having just moved to Colorado, Alec is excited about continuing his journey as a music director there throughout the coming years.

Throughout all of this, Alec has grown and maintained a steady practice of upwards of 20 piano students, spanning age, proficiency and time zone. His teaching style caters directly to the student and lives in response to his personal musical journey across a multitude of mediums, styles and genres. One of his favorite moments happens four times a year at his quarterly recitals, in which his students showcase their work in a supportive environment, coming together in support of their mutual progress. As someone still expanding his influences and developing his voice, Alec is in many ways still a student himself. As eager as he is passionate, he's happiest when exploring new sounds and solving musical problems. Looking forward, he plans to embark on a series of new projects: the first, a set of preludes inspired by various summits in the Rocky Mountains. Whatever the future brings, there will be no shortage of music.