Bruce Brubaker (pianist)

Bruce Brubaker is an American artist, musician, concert pianist, and writer born in Iowa.

Brubaker's work uses and combines Western classical music with postmodern artistic, literary, theatrical, and philosophical ideas. He is associated with the recent revitalization of classical music (sometimes termed "alternative classical"). He has created and performed multidisciplinary projects at the , the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival,Columbia University, and at the Juilliard School. He is praised as a performer of music by Philip Glass;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." Brubaker has published articles about music and semiotics, and performance as research. Brubaker advocates the treatment of written music as "text"—he has sometimes performed and recorded new music without the direct input of the composer. 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." 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."

Brubaker was born in Des Moines, Iowa and educated at the Juilliard School where his primary teacher was pianist Jacob Lateiner. 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, Haydn's music at the Wigmore Hall, Messiaen's music and Philip Glass's music at New York City's (Le) Poisson Rouge nightclub, Brahms's music at Leipzig's Gewandhaus, and extemporizing simultaneous performances with his former student Francesco Tristano and jazz legend Ran Blake.

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