About Neely Bruce

Neely Bruce (b. 1944) has composed over 800 pieces of music, including three full-length operas, five one-act operas, oratorios and other choral works, about 300 solo songs, chamber music, seven documentary video scores for PBS, and fourteen hours worth of solo piano music.

Major works include CONVERGENCE, a series of three composed parades with auxiliary musical events of a stationary nature, scored for multiple marching bands, multiple choruses, three or more organs, at least two fife and drum corps, bagpipes, two orchestras, jazz band, West African drumming ensemble, Native American ensemble, Javanese gamelan, West Indian steel drums, mariachi, samba, and two solo trumpets; The Portals of St Bartholomew, a site-specific, spatial work for St Bartholomew's Church in New York City; and the dramatic oratorio Circular 14: The Apotheosis of Aristides, about the extraordinary life and achievement of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who in 1940 issued thousands of illegal visas that allowed refugees fleeing the Nazis to enter Portugal.

Circular 14 was first performed at American Jewish University in Los Angeles in 2016, under the direction of Donald Brinegar, in a version with reduced orchestration; the version with full orchestra was presented at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in 2018, under the direction of Barlow Bradford.

In 2005 Bruce set the Bill of Rights to music, in the style of William Billings. This work, for chorus and eight instruments, has been performed 37 times — at the Newseum in Washington D.C., Faneuil Hall in Boston, Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, and throughout New England.

In a series of seventeen recitals (2013–2019) entitled This Is It! Bruce performed his complete solo piano music. These recitals were recorded and posted on SoundCloud. To date he is the only composer-pianist to have recorded his complete works for the instrument. In 2021 he began This Is It! 2.0, a similar ongoing series consisting of chamber works and song cycles.

As a scholar of American music, his publications include "One Composer's Take on the Beethoven of America" (in The Western Minstrel — Voyages through the life of Anthony Philip Heinrich), and "Sacred Choral Music in the United States: An Overview" (in The Cambridge Companion to Singing). His American music enthusiasms include William Billings, The Sacred Harp, Arthur Farwell, John Cage, Henry Brant, music by American women, and popular music of the nineteenth century.

He was the founder and director of two ensembles devoted exclusively to music of the United States — the American Music Group at the University of Illinois and the American Music/Theatre Group, headquartered in Hartford. Important premieres as a keyboardist include The Time Curve Preludes of William Duckworth, Twelve Fugues by Gerald Shapiro, the Arthur Farwell Piano Sonata, and HPSCHD by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller.

Important engagements as a conductor include the twentieth-century revival of Rip Van Winkle by George Bristow and several major works of Henry Brant at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, the Guggenheim Museum, Roulette, and Wesleyan University. With the composer's widow, Kathy Wilkowski, he is co-executor of the Brant musical estate.

He is the only pianist to have accompanied all of the solo vocal music of Charles Ives. The culmination of his involvement with this repertory was the Ives Vocal Marathon — six concerts comprising all of the songs in all of their versions (202 pieces in all), on January 31, February 1 and 2, 2010. In 2021–22 he and James Sinclair produced an online Urtext edition of the Ives songs for the Charles Ives Society. Twelve Easy Songs by Charles Ives, co-edited by Sinclair and Bruce, is available from Peermusic Classical.