This Is It! 2.0: The Complete Chamber Music of Neely Bruce - Part IV

Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 3:00pm
Crowell Concert Hall

Free

Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest.

This festive concert will feature the chamber music of Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.

The concert will include the world premiere of "Fantasy Variations for oboe, violin, viola, and cello" based on Interlude No. 3 from Bruce's "The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets." The new work will be performed by Stephen Wade on oboe, Deborah Tyler on violin, Gretchen Frazier on viola, and Thomas Hudson on cello. The concert will also feature the world premieres of "A Fugue with Two Subjects for Sam Lowe" and "A Double Fugue for Ellen and Harvey Knell." And baritone Christopher Grundy will sing "A Garland of Sacred Song."

The original This Is It! series featured seventeen concerts of Bruce’s piano music and concluded in March 2019. The first installment of This Is It! 2.0 was held in February 2022.

Neely Bruce is a composer, performer, and scholar of American music. His compositions include three full-length operas, five one-act operas, works for orchestra, chamber orchestra, and wind ensemble, and much more. While teaching at Wesleyan since 1974, he has also been involved in several major premieres, including "HPSCHD" by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, "Meteor Farm" and other spatial works by Henry Brant, and the 20th-century revival of "Rip Van Winkle" by George Bristow. Bruce is the only pianist to have performed the complete solo vocal music of Charles Ives.