Bruce Brubaker

I’m Bruce Brubaker — not Bruce Wayne! And yet, while I chair the piano department at America’s oldest institution of professional musical training, New England Conservatory in Boston, increasingly technology turns my professional piano playing life into a kind of “caped crusade.” Recordings such the new American piano music CDs I make for Arabesque reach a lot of different listeners, and seem to break through some old divisions of high culture/pop, or art/entertainment.

In this electronic Gotham City, my fans listen to Radiohead, Carl Craig, Vampire Weekend, and even the occasional Mozart track! iTunes, Last.fm, MySpace, and YouTube are allowing music lovers to discover music they never could have encountered so easily in the past. Live performances begin to reflect this change: this year I play at Harvard University, traditional concert venues in Maine, Los Angeles, Taiwan, Munich, Cleveland and Cincinnati — as well such nightclubs as New York’s new (le) Poisson Rouge, and The Stone.