Art Murphy

Arthur "Art" Bixler Murphy (January 25, 1942 – November 19, 2006) was a classical and jazz musician, pianist and composer. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Oberlin, OH, where his father was a member of the Oberlin College faculty.

Murphy was a founding member of the Philip Glass and Steve Reich Ensembles, and played a key role in the development of minimalist music.

He received a master's degree in Composition in 1966 from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, NY, where he studied with composer Luciano Berio and received several BMI Foundation composition prizes. Murphy’s classmates at Juilliard included composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Reich's ensemble was formed in 1966. The original three members were Reich, Art Murphy and Jon Gibson. Reich sought out Murphy’s knowledge of serial composition and changing time signatures to help give life to the new musical concepts they developed.

Reich explained how he worked with Murphy on the piece Piano Phase (1967):

"...the direct result of my work in 1965-66 on two identical audio loops played simultaneously on two separate tape recorders... Over the course of several months, Art Murphy and I – by first working at home playing against tape recordings of our own performance, and then playing on two pianos – found that, while we lacked the perfection of the machine, we could give a good approximation of it and we got to like this totally new and particularly satisfying way of playing, which was completely worked out in advance and eliminated the necessity of actually reading a score. The result was that we became totally absorbed in listening while we were playing the piece."

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