Bruce Brubaker

In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his series of recordings for Arabesque, Bruce Brubaker is the new pianist—a combination of visionary virtuoso and artistic provocateur. His playing, writing, and collaborations have shown a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing.

Bruce Brubaker’s CD, inner cities (Arabesque 6776), is a recording of piano music by Alvin Curran and John Adams, including Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Adams’s opera Nixon in China. The previous disc in Brubaker’s series for Arabesque, glass cage (Arabesque 6744), featuring music by Philip Glass and John Cage, was named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine. The third CD in the series, Hope Street Tunnel Blues, including music by Philip Glass and Alvin Curran and Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, will be released in 2007.

Following his debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Musical America named Bruce Brubaker a Young Musician of the Year. His subsequent London recital debut at the Wigmore Hall led to his first broadcast concert on the BBC, an all-Brahms recital. Brubaker has premiered music by John Cage, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Jonathan Lloyd, Daron Hagen, and performed Glass’s piano music in concerts and broadcasts throughout the world. (He gave first performances of Glass’s Six Etudes in London, Boston, and Manila.) He made the world premiere recording of Edward Steuermann’s Piano Sonata for the audiophile label Vital Music (partnering it with music by Wagner and Brahms). Brubaker has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; with New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s; as part of the St. Louis Symphony’s Copland 2000 Festival; at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and at Finland’s Kuhmo Festival. In 2001, Brubaker created a performance honoring philanthropist Irene Diamond at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall; with newly created musical material, the performance linked together compositions by Philip Glass, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Johannes Brahms to make a seamless sound fabric. In 2005, Brubaker performed in Carnegie Hall’s tribute to composer Meredith Monk at Zankel Hall in New York.

With the sponsorship of Steinway & Sons, Bruce Brubaker created and performed Pianomorphosis, a new seventy-minute multidisciplinary performance piece, for the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. The work was also mounted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He created a new performance project, called Haydnseek, for the Luxembourg Gesellschaft for New Music. The project overlays piano music by Franz Joseph Haydn with electronically created sound material by composer/DJ Nico Muhly based on samples drawn from Brubaker’s performances of Haydn’s music; Haydnseek was presented by Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Arts as part of the opening series of performances in the museum’s new Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro building. With BBC producer Lyndon Jones, Brubaker crafted a series of five radio documentaries for BBC Radio 3’s “Composer of the Week” that explored minimalism in the American arts and its societal implications. In 1998, at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, Brubaker collaborated with a team of theatrical lighting and sound designers and the director Ian Belton to create the acclaimed, evening-long, multidisciplinary performance piece “A Room.”

Bruce Brubaker was profiled by NBC’s Today show, and has appeared on RAI, the Italian national television network. He is featured in the recent documentary film about the Juilliard School, made for the “American Masters Series” on the PBS network in the U. S. Brubaker received a Solo Recitalist fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was selected from over one hundred pianists for Affiliate Artists’ pioneering Xerox Pianists Program, and presented residencies and performed with orchestras throughout the United States. He has appeared in Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta, Seattle, and New York, and toured England, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Latin America, and Asia. A native of the state of Iowa, Brubaker is the Artistic Director of SummerMusic, the chamber music festival that takes place there annually; he co-founded the organization.

Brubaker was the creator of Piano Century, a retrospective of twentieth-century piano music comprised of eleven concerts involving one hundred and one pianists at the Juilliard School in 2000. He also curated B-A-C-H, a six-concert consideration of the reception of J. S. Bach’s keyboard music and issues of reception inherent in it; his associated presentation “Präludium” was filmed for later release on public television. Brubaker created hypertextual program booklets for Piano Century and B-A-C-H. He has directed three interdisciplinary performance projects at Juilliard, “30 Minutes,” collaboratively created with dance, music, and drama students, “Richard Didn’t Play Hindemith,” a deconstruction of Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, and “Party Window Box.” In honor of legendary American Gunther Schuller’s eightieth birthday, Brubaker conceived and directed “I Hear America: Gunther Schuller at 80” a festival of concerts and discussions jointly presented in Boston and Cambridge by New England Conservatory, Harvard University’s Office of the Arts, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The festival included a panel discussion at New England Conservatory which occasioned James Levine’s first visit to the conservatory since he became music director of the BSO. In association with the Boston Symphony, Brubaker coordinated two concerts at Jordan Hall featuring NEC student pianists performing music by Beethoven and Schoenberg,

At the Juilliard School, Brubaker has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk. He collaborated with Ms. Monk in the preparation of her piano works for publication by Boosey & Hawkes (forthcoming). As a member of Juilliard’s Centennial Planning Committee he originated several important commissions, most notably Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Manhattan Trilogy which was premiered at Carnegie Hall in October 2005. Brubaker was program advisor to DocArtes, headquartered at the Orpheus Institut in Ghent. He was a faculty participant in the International Orpheus Academy in 2007. Brubaker has given master classes and forums at New England Conservatory, Columbia University, Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris, North Carolina’s Eastern Music Festival, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His articles about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Piano Quarterly, Keyboard Classics, Chamber Music, and other periodicals. His article “Questions Not Answers: the performer as researcher” will appears in the February 2007 issue of the Dutch Journal of Music Theory (Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie). He was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2000), celebrating his teacher.

Brubaker studied at the Juilliard School, where he was awarded the school’s highest prize. He earned three degrees at Juilliard: Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, and Doctor of Musical Arts. His doctoral document, “Pianist’s Life,” was a study of the social and cultural implications of the position of the concert pianist in contemporary America. He joined the undergraduate faculty at Juilliard in 1995, and went on to become the first recipient of the school’s John Erskine Faculty Prize. He later joined the school’s graduate faculty and doctoral governance committee and, for the first time in the history of Juilliard, created an interdisciplinary performance course bringing together musicians, actors, and dancers. In 2004, Bruce Brubaker was named to the piano faculty of Boston’s New England Conservatory. In 2005, he became chair of the conservatory’s piano department.