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NEELY BRUCE (b. 1944), Professor of Music and
American Studies at Wesleyan University, is a composer, conductor, pianist
and scholar of American music. His undergraduate degree is from the
University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa; he received his DMA from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His principal teachers were Ben Johnston,
Hubert Kessler, J. F. Goossen, Lara Hoggard, Charles Hamm, Byrnell Figler,
Roy McAllister, Soulima Stravinsky and Sophia Rosoff. He has been visiting
professor and artist-in-residence at Middlebury College, Bucknell
University, the University of Michigan, and at Brooklyn College. He is the
chorus director for Connecticut Opera, and, with his wife Phyllis,
co-director of music at South Congregational Church in Middletown,
Connecticut. For a complete catalogue of his work, see
compositions.
His largest work is entitled CONVERGENCE. [STEPPIN'
OUT,
Continental Harmony,
Charles Ives
Newsletter - Here’s to Ives, Commissioned by the American Composers
Forum, as part of its Continental Harmony project, this composition received
its premiere on June 18, 2000 as part of the New Haven International
Festival of Arts and Ideas. CONVERGENCE, a series of three composed parades
with auxiliary musical events of a stationary nature, is scored for multiple
marching bands, multiple choruses, three or more organs, fife and drum
corps, bagpipes, two orchestras, jazz band, West African drumming ensemble,
Native American ensemble, Javanese gamelan, West Indian steel drums, and two
solo trumpets. On August 18, 2002 Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors presented a
revised and expanded performance of this piece, enthusiastically received by
an audience of 10,000. A new production of CONVERGENCE has been proposed in
Danbury, Connecticut (birthplace of Charles Ives).
Bruce’s opera Hansel and Gretel, commissioned by Connecticut Opera, received
its first performances as a chamber work for children (soloists with piano
and/or small ensemble) in 1997. The full-scale work (adding dancers, chorus
and orchestra) premiered in March of 1998 at The Bushnell in Hartford. In
December 2002 Trinity College of Music, London, presented the first student
production of this opera, the composer conducting. Hansel and Gretel will be
presented on tour in the Netherlands by the Max Tak Orchestra in December
2005.
In July 2003 he composed the score for Benedict
Arnold: A Brave Revenge by John Basinger. Produced by Connecticut Outdoor
Historic Drama, Inc., this epic was presented in Washington Park, Groton,
Connecticut, on the spot where British troops mustered prior to the Battle
of Groton Heights, the very conflict enacted at the climax of the play. The
score, for fiddle, flutes, percussion and key-board, uses traditional tunes,
military music, original material and special effects to evoke the spirit of
the 1770s and 1780s. It is the most recent of Bruce’s works to draw on
historical American sources.
Other works for the stage include an allegorical
opera of the American Revolution, Americana, or, A New Tale of the Genii
(libretto by Tony Connor). This full-length work was begun on a fellow-ship
from the National Endowment for the Arts. Produced in a semi-staged concert
version by the American Music/Theatre Group and Orchestra New England, it
awaits its first completely staged production. Americana is the first of a
projected trilogy of operas which treat the political history of the United
States as mythology. His three one-act musicals entitled Cousins, Brothers
and Sisters and Parents (libretti by Phyllis Bruce, based on the New
Testament), were premiered 1999-2001 at South Church, Middletown, with a
large cast (ranging in age from four to eighty), dancers, gamelan and a
six-piece band. A revised, expanded version of Cousins was produced in March
2004.
Bruce has also composed two one-act operas, five
concerti, other orchestral compositions, keyboard works, over 250 solo
songs, a series of Grand Duos for various solo instruments and piano, pieces
for tape with and without live performance, and large-scale chamber works.
Commissions received include works for Donald Nally and the Bridge Ensemble,
the Claude Kipnis Mime Troupe, Stuart Dempster, Richard Biles, James
Fulkerson, Larry Palmer, and Sandra Kopell. Two of Bruce’s major works, the
oratorio Hugomotion and the Second Violin Concerto, were commissioned by the
late Ruth Steinkraus Cohen. His Perfumes and Meanings for sixteen solo
voices was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and premiered at Queen
Elizabeth Hall by London Voices, conducted by William Brooks.
On April 13, 1993, the 250th anniversary of the
birth of Thomas Jefferson, his composition for male chorus entitled Young T.
J. was heard at Monticello, the Jefferson Memorial (with President and Mrs.
Clinton in attendance), at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, and broadcast on
the NBC Today show, NPR’s Performance Today, and Voice of America. Young T.
J. was commissioned by the Virginia Glee Club, John Liepold, director.
The Pond for chorus and orchestra (text by
Louise Glück), was commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding
of Indian Springs School. It was first performed on May 30, 2002 by the ISS
Concert Choir and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tim Thomas.
(Bruce is one of many distinguished recipients of the ISS Outstanding Alumus
Award.) Other commissions include Leon’s Invasion for soloists and six
theremins, commissioned by Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors; and Tunes ‘n’
Timbres ‘n’ Time: A History of Western Music for the Organ, a
sixteen-movement work commissioned by St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York
City, and premiered by William Trafka.
His “rock phantasmagoria” for four voices and
tape, The Plague: A Commentary on the Work of the Fourth Horseman, was
commissioned by Electric Phoenix and performed many times in the United
States, Europe, and at festivals in Huddersfield and Newcastle (UK). The
Plague, and Bruce’s other works for this virtuoso ensemble—Eight Ghosts
(Michael McClure) and The Dream of the Other Dreamers (Walt Whitman)—have
been released on CD by Mode. Five of the Eight Ghosts were performed by
Electric Phoenix at IRCAM in Paris. Other important performances include the
premiere in Amsterdam of Paul Goodman Settings, sung by Charles Van Tassel;
three movements of Orion Rising: First Album for Orchestra played by the
Hartford Symphony; Pink Music: First Album for Organ, played by Wesleyan
University organist Ronald Ebrecht; Wild Oysters II for electric cello,
played by Jeffrey Krieger; and 4 + 1 for string quartet and piano, performed
in Holland, Canada and the United States by the Mondriaan Quartet, with the
composer at the keyboard.
Bruce composed original music for three
documentaries directed by Rocky Collins and produced for National Public
Television’s The American Experience. He has composed and arranged the
scores for two documentaries about African Americans in Connecticut,
produced by Connecticut Public Television and directed by Karyl Evans. His
score for Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Neighbor-hood, directed by Roynn Lisa
Simmons, first aired in January 2002 on CPTV.
Bruce has worked indefatigably to promote
American music of all periods. He was on the Editorial Committee of New
World Records and was the first chairman of the New England Sacred Harp
Singing. He is one of nineteen living composers represented in The Sacred
Harp, and music in this style is an important part of his output. In June of
1997 Larry Gordon conducted Village Harmony, an inter-generational choir of
shaped note singers, in a touring program devoted to Bruce’s music in shaped
note style. Gordon’s recording of these choruses was released in 2000. In
2003 Bruce, along with Peter Amidon and Larry Siegel, conducted the choral
group Festival Harmony in pieces from their shaped-note œuvre. Festival
Harmony plans a complete performance of Emily’s Flowers in the summer of
2004.
He has conducted new works by over sixty
composers, including major premieres of Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros,
Gerald Shapiro, David Borden, Ronald Kuivila and Henry Brant. In recent
years he has worked extensively with Brant; he obtained for Brant a
commission from Wesleyan University in honor of the school’s
sesquicentennial, and was the coordinator of two major works commissioned by
Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors; 500: Hidden Hemisphere, and Dormant Craters. In
March of 2003 Bruce conducted the American premiere of Brant’s Ghosts and
Gargoyles, played by members of the New York Flute Club, with soloist Robert
Aitkin.
Long associated with the works of the late John
Cage, principally as a performer in HPSCHD and Song Books, in1988 Bruce
planned and executed a major symposium about Cage and his cultural influence
entitled John Cage at Wesleyan. In 1996 he and his wife, along with Linda
Hirst, produced Cage’s Europeras 3, 4 and 5 for the Dartington International
School of the Arts in Totnes, England.
Bruce sponsored and arranged the first American
tour of the Ricciotti Ensemble, Holland’s youth street orchestra. The
composer of four works for this remarkable group, Bruce has guest-conducted
the Ricciotti on tour in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
As a pianist Bruce is best known for his
recordings of American music, which include popular piano pieces of the
nineteenth century, works of Anthony Philip Heinrich, and The Time Curve
Preludes by William Duckworth. After decades of devoting himself almost
exclusively to performing the music of the United States, in 1993 he began
to relearn and perform the standard repertory of his youth — the Chopin
etudes, the Schubert C minor Sonata, the Brahms “Paganini” variations,
sonatas by Beethoven, both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier and many
other works. He played two all-Chopin concerts in June of 1999, to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death.
Predictably, all of this pianistic activity has
lead to the composition of new works for the instrument, including Chopin
Jam, Forty Times Forty, The Blue Box: Modal Music in Twelve Movements,
Homage to Seb, and a collection of thirty-six Geographical Preludes. On
April 12, 2003 at the Bushnell the Connecticut Dance Alliance Statewide
Festival presented a dance choreographed to many of these preludes. In
January of 1994, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he performed his
principal original works for piano in a series of three recitals at
Wesleyan. He performed an expanded series (his “complete works” for solo
piano) in and around Birmingham, Alabama in May 2004.
Since 1998 Bruce has worked intensively with
Sophia Rosoff, director of the Abby Whiteside Foundation and piano pedagogue
extraordinaire. He is authorized to teach according to the methods of Abby
Whiteside: see www.abbywhiteside.org
for details.