“Written with grace, intelligence, and authority, never patronizing or arcane, generously leavened by wit and humor...”
Books
Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition
Part of Elements in Creativity and Imagination
This Element investigates the balance and interaction of imagination (visions) and technique (decisions) in the composition of music and includes current scientific research on dreams, the hypnagogic state, emotions, and feelings. It also includes thoughts of composers past and present, and examines how works start from visions in a range of music, comparing musical ideas and techniques to models in other creative disciplines. The Element elucidates aspects of musical discourse by imagining how Haydn, Mozart, and other composers would order falafel for takeout. This unorthodox approach emphasizes parallels between music and theater that are central to this Element.
The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights
With one chapter by Bruce Adolphe: The Sound of Human Rights: Wordless Music That Speaks for Humanity
The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights is a collection of case studies spanning a wide range of concerns about music and human rights in response to intensifying challenges to the well-being of individuals, peoples, and the planet. It brings forward the expertise of academic researchers, lawyers, human rights practitioners, and performing musicians who offer critical reflection on how their work might identify, inform, or advance mutual interests in their respective fields. The book is comprised of 28 chapters, interspersed with 23 ‘voices’ – portraits that focus on individuals’ intimate experiences with music in the defence or advancement of human rights – and explores the following four themes: 1) Fundamentals on music and human rights; 2) Music in pursuit of human rights; 3) Music as a means of violating human rights; 4) Human rights and music: intrinsic resonances.
The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Composers, and Listeners
The Mind's Ear offers a unique approach to stimulating the musical imagination and inspiring creativity, as well as providing detailed exercises aimed at improving the ability to read and imagine music in silence, in the "mind's ear." Modelling his exercises on those used in theatre games and acting classes and drawing upon years of experience with improvisation and composition, Bruce Adolphe has written a compelling, valuable, and practical guide to musical creativity that can benefit music students at all levels and help music teachers be more effective and inspiring. This expanded edition offers 34 new exercises inspired by improv comedy, hip-hop sampling and loops, robots, and AI as well as a new section based on Mr. Adolphe's Piano Puzzlers segment on public radio's Performance Today. The book provides provocative ideas and useful tools for professional performers and composers, as well as offering games and exercises to serious listeners that can increase their musical understanding and level of engagement with music in a variety of ways.
"Combining wisdom, humor, and clarity is a skill Bruce has mastered. He is the personification of a fun, educational experience."
— Weston Sprott, Dean of the Preparatory Division The Juilliard School
"I direct a seminar on the Beethoven string quartets at the Department of Medical Humanities at Columbia University, and I find The Mind's Ear to be an invaluable wellspring of ideas to engage these medical students in a way that is fresh, challenging, and fun. These students come from a wide variety of musical backgrounds, and the group exercises prescribed by The Mind's Ear allow them to focus on skills—hearing multiple lines, listening while vocalizing, and following cues from the peers—that they enjoy honing. These activities break the ice, expand the mind, and broaden the perspective. They make the students better listeners, and perhaps better doctors!"
— Benjamin Lebwohl, MD, MS, Louis and Gloria Flanzer Scholar, Columbia University Medical Center; Director of Clinical Research, The Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University; Director of Quality Improvement, Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases
Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal
Edited by Suzanne Nalbantian and Paul W. Matthews
Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal draws on insights from leading neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities and the arts to probe creativity in its many contexts, in the everyday mind, the exceptional mind, the scientific mind, the artistic mind, and the pathological mind. Components of creativity are specified with respect to types of memory, forms of intelligence, modes of experience, and kinds of emotion. Authors in this volume take on the challenge of showing how creativity can be characterized behaviorally, cognitively, and neurophysiologically. The complementary perspectives of the authors add to the richness of these findings. Neuroscientists describe the functioning of the brain and its circuitry in creative acts of scientific discovery or aesthetic production. Humanists from the fields of literature, art, and music give analyses of creativity in major literary works, musical compositions, and works of visual art.
In his chapter, The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition, Bruce Adolphe discusses the compositional process, explores "attentive dreaming" versus "thinking" musically, analyzes passages of music by Mozart and Beethoven, and considers how decisions are made using examples from his own music, including his Einstein's Light and Musics of Memory.
Available on Amazon
What to Listen for in the World
With disciplined lyricism and entirely devoid of technical jargon, Bruce Adolphe's book probes into the heart of such matters as the role of memory and imagination in creative expression, the meaning of inspiration, spirituality in music, the challenge of arts education and how music communicates.
Of Mozart, Parrots, Cherry Blossoms in the Wind: A Composer Explores Mysteries of the Musical Mind
The exhilarating mix of humor, philosophy, fact and whimsy that marks these essays derives from more than 200 lectures Bruce Adolphe has given over most of the past decade, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and at music festivals around the country. The composer of four operas as well as chamber music, concertos and orchestral works, Adolphe has written for Itzhak Perlman, David Shifrin, Beaux Arts Trio, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and many other renowned musicians. His essays, however divergent their apparent subjects, all serve a common purpose: to deepen our understanding of how music comes to be and how it may be enjoyed.
Piano Puzzlers: As Heard on APM's Performance Today
Brand-new edition of Bruce Adolphe’s Piano Puzzlers as heard on American Public Media’s “Performance Today.” Includes 32 tunes with songs by Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, Porter, Rodgers, Fats Waller, Lennon & McCartney, and others disguised in the styles of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Janacek, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Copland. Includes an introduction by Fred Child, host of “Performance Today” as well as background info by Bruce Adolphe.
Piano Puzzlers
On public radio stations throughout the country, Bruce Adolphe, creative director of The Learning Maestros, plays popular melodies disguised as pieces by great Classical composers and contestants call in to guess the tune and the composer whose style Bruce is imitating. For the first time, 30 of Bruce’s Piano Puzzlers are available as sheet music!
Available on The Learning Maestros or Amazon