Bruce Adolphe
Bruce Adolphe — known to millions of Americans from his Piano Puzzlers, broadcast weekly on public radio’s Performance Today with Fred Child since 2002 — has composed a substantial body of music inspired by science, visual arts, and human rights, as well as works for young audiences. Mr. Adolphe’s works based on writings by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio include: Memories of a Possible Future; Self Comes to Mind; and Musics of Memory. Yo-Yo Ma premiered Self Comes to Mind in 2009 at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Other science-inspired music includes Einstein’s Light, recorded by Joshua Bell and Marija Stroke for Sony Classical, and his tribute to astronaut Piers Sellers, I saw how fragile and infinitely precious the world is, performed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2019. Among his human rights works are I Will Not Remain Silent for violin and orchestra and Reach Out, Raise Hope, Change Society for chorus, wind quintet, and three percussionists. Adolphe’s many works for young listeners include Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto, Tough Turkey in the Big City (script by Louise Gikow), and one-act operas The Amazing Adventure of Alvin Allegretto (written with librettist Sarah Schlessinger for the Metropolitan Opera Guild), and Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson (written with librettist Caroliva Herron for the Washington National Opera).
Mr. Adolphe is the resident lecturer and director of family concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the author of several books, including The Mind’s Ear (OUP). He contributed the chapter on composing to Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (OUP, 2019), an anthology of writings by neuroscientists and artists. In 2020, Mr. Adolphe is creating a series of video memoirs for weekly social media broadcasts by Performance Today and an educational video series called InspectorPulse@Home for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Current compositional projects include My Lost One, setting a poem by Reem Al-Shamiry, for the Human Rights Orchestra and soprano Angel Blue; and Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt for the Dallas Symphony.