Bruce Adolphe
Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Programs
Resident lecturer and director of family concerts for CMS since 1992, Bruce Adolphe is a composer of international renown, much of whose output addresses science, history, and the struggle for human rights.
Resident lecturer and director of family concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1992, Bruce Adolphe is a composer of international renown, much of whose output addresses science, history, and the struggle for human rights. His works are frequently performed by major artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Fabio Luisi, Joshua Bell, Daniel Hope, Angel Blue, the Brentano String Quartet, the Washington National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Human Rights Orchestra of Europe, and over 60 orchestras worldwide. Among his most performed works are the violin concerto I Will Not Remain Silent, the violin/piano duo Einstein’s Light, and Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto.
Also an author and innovative educator, Bruce Adolphe has spent decades helping people to hear and enjoy music in extraordinary ways. He is the author of several books, including Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition (Cambridge, 2023); The Mind’s Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Listeners and Composers (Oxford, 3rd ed., 2021); the chapter on composing in Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (Oxford, 2019); and a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights (2022).
Widely known for his weekly Piano Puzzler segment on American Public Media’s Performance Today, which has been broadcast since 2002, Mr. Adolphe has been a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, visiting lecturer in the residential colleges at Yale, composer-in-residence and visiting scholar at the Brain and Creativity Institute in Los Angeles, distinguished composer-in-residence at the Mannes College of Music, and on faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Juilliard School. He was recently named a Steinway Artist.
