Bruce Adolphe

Composer, author, teacher, and inter-disciplinary thinker Bruce Adolphe has spent decades helping people to hear and enjoy music in extraordinary ways. He is a composer of international renown, whose works have been performed by Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Hope, Joshua Bell, Fabio Luisi, Angel Blue, the Brentano Quartet, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Washington National Opera, and over 60 symphony orchestras worldwide. He is the author of several books, including The Mind’s Ear: Exercises to Improve the Musical Imagination for Performers, Composers, and Listeners (OUP, third edition 2021); What to Listen for in the World (1998), Of Mozart, Parrots, and Cherry Blossoms in the Wind (1999), and the chapter “The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition” in Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (2019). Widely known for his weekly Piano Puzzler segment, broadcast since 2002, on public radio’s Performance Today, Mr. Adolphe has been resident lecturer and director of family concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York since 1992. Mr. Adolphe is also the artistic director of the Off the Hook Arts Festival in Colorado and has twice been a participant in the Salzburg Global Seminar. He lives in New York with his wife, pianist Marija Stroke, their daughter, Katja Stroke-Adolphe, and Polly Rhythm, the opera-singing parrot.

Photo by Barbara Luisi