Bruce Brubaker

Bruce Brubaker in 1995, photo: Hatice Nazan Isik

Bruce Brubaker is a musician, artist, concert pianist, and writer from the United States.

Concepts[]

Brubaker's work uses and combines Western classical music with postmodern artistic, literary, theatrical, and philosophical ideas.^[1][2] He is associated with the twenty-first century revitalization of classical music (sometimes termed "alternative classical").^[3] With over 125 million plays on Spotify, Brubaker reaches a large music audience online. Brubaker's recordings have been remixed by prominent electronic musicians, including Plaid, Max Cooper, Akufen, Francesco Tristano, Arandel, and others.^[4] He is praised as a performer of music by Philip Glass;^[5][6] The New York Times wrote: "Few pianists approach Philip Glass's music with the level of devotion and insight that Bruce Brubaker brings to it, precisely the reason he gets so much expressivity out of it."^[7] He has created and performed multidisciplinary artworks at the Festival de La Roque-d'Anthéron,^[8] the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,^[9] Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study,^[10] the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival,^[11] Columbia University,^[12] and at the Juilliard School. Brubaker has published articles about music and semiotics,^[13] and performance as research.^[14] Brubaker advocates the treatment of written music as "text"—he has sometimes performed and recorded new music without the direct input of the composer.^[15] Brubaker has said: "The piano is a tool that can be used in different ways. Classical music can be taken as material for new art."^[16] Brubaker has argued that technology is returning music to a pre-composer condition, and equalizing or blurring the roles of listener, performer, and composer. In a conversation with Philip Glass in Princeton, Brubaker referred to "the demise of the composer." Brubaker said: "Now, it's becoming a little less clear who creates a work, who plays the work, and who listens to the work. Those roles used to seem to be so clear – you know, Beethoven wrote it, Brendel played it, and the audience at Carnegie heard it. But I don't think that quite works anymore."^[17]

Background[]

Brubaker was born in Des Moines, Iowa in the United States and educated at the Juilliard School^[18] where his primary teacher was pianist Jacob Lateiner.^[19][20] At Juilliard, he also studied with Milton Babbitt and Felix Galimir, and with Louis Krasner at Tanglewood. As a concert pianist, he has appeared performing Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl,^[21] Haydn's music at the Wigmore Hall,^[22] Alvin Curran's music at Kings Place in London,^[23] Messiaen's music and Philip Glass's music at New York City's (Le) Poisson Rouge nightclub,^[24] Brahms's music at Leipzig's Gewandhaus, and extemporizing simultaneous performances with his former student Francesco Tristano^[25] and jazz legend Ran Blake.

He received a fellowship grant from the National Endowment from the Arts,^[26] and was named Young Musician of the Year by Musical America. Brubaker was a National Merit Scholar. He has performed at Leipzig's Gewandhaus, New York's David Geffen Hall, and Antwerp's Queen Elizabeth Hall.^[27] Brubaker's blog "PianoMorphosis" appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Recording[]

Brubaker's solo piano recordings survey a range of American music by Philip Glass,^[5] John Adams, Alvin Curran, William Duckworth, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, and John Cage.^[28] Brubaker has premiered piano music by Cage, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Nico Muhly,^[29] and Daron Hagen. He has collaborated with Meredith Monk.^[30] In 2012, Brubaker, together with Ursula Oppens, recorded Monk's piano music.^[31] His album Codex includes multiple readings of Terry Riley's Keyboard Study No. 2 and Renaissance keyboard pieces from the Faenza Codex.

Curator and teacher[]

For nine years, Brubaker was a faculty member at The Juilliard School^[32] where he originated an interdisciplinary performance program in 2001, producing new work with dancers, actors, and musicians. Students from Brubaker's piano repertory class at Juilliard include many distinguished pianists: Francesco Tristano, Simone Dinnerstein, Shai Wosner, Helen Huang, Vicky Chow, David Greilsammer, Elizabeth Joy Roe, Greg Anderson, Vikingur Olafsson, Stewart Goodyear, Adam Nieman, Soyeon Lee, Terrence Wilson, Christopher Guzman, Eric Huebner. At Juilliard, he gave public presentations with Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Milton Babbitt.^[33] In 2000, he produced "Piano Century," an eleven-concert retrospective of 20th-century piano music.^[34] Since 2004, Brubaker is a faculty member at Boston's New England Conservatory where he has curated several projects in collaboration with the Boston Symphony and Harvard University.^[33][35] At New England Conservatory, Brubaker has appeared in public conversations with Alvin Curran, Meredith Monk, Tim Page, Salvatore Sciarrino and Russell Sherman.

In 1994, Brubaker founded SummerMusic now held at Drake University in his hometown of Des Moines; he returns annually to lead it.^[36]

Discography[]

Brubaker records for ECM, InFiné, Arabesque,^[37] and Bedroom Community.

• Brahms, Wagner, Steuermann, music for piano by Brahms, Wagner, and Edward Steuermann, Vital Music, 1994
• glass cage, music for piano by Philip Glass and John Cage, Arabesque, 2000
• Inner Cities, music for piano by John Adams and Alvin Curran, Arabesque, 2004
• Hope Street Tunnel Blues, music for piano by Philip Glass and Alvin Curran, Arabesque, 2007
• Time Curve, music for piano by Glass and William Duckworth, Arabesque, 2009
• Drones & Piano EP, music for piano and electronics by Nico Muhly, Bedroom Community, 2012^[38]
• Drones & Viola EP, with Nadia Sirota, viola, music for viola and piano by Nico Muhly, Bedroom Community, 2012^[39]
• Drones, with Nadia Sirota, viola, Pekka Kuusisto, violin, Nico Muhly, piano, Bedroom Community, 2012
• Piano Songs, music for solo piano and 2 pianos by Meredith Monk, including arrangements by Brubaker, ECM, 2014
• Glass Piano, music for piano by Philip Glass, including arrangements by Brubaker, InFiné (Warp Records), 2015
• Glass Piano: Versions, remixes by Plaid, Francesco Tristano, Akufen, John Beltran, Biblo, and Julian Earle, InFiné (Warp Records), 2015
• Revelations, music for solo piano and chamber music by Su Lian Tan, Arsis, 2017
• Codex, music from Codex Faenza and 6 versions of Terry Riley's Keyboard Study No. 2, InFiné (Warp Records), 2018
• Codex Versions, remixes by Max Cooper, Olga Bell, and Arandel, InFiné (Warp Records), 2018
• Glassforms, music by Philip Glass, Bruce Brubaker, and Max Cooper, InFiné, 2020

References[]