Robert Gluck

Robert Gluck (born 1955) is a pianist and composer whose repertoire spans jazz, live electronic music, and avant-garde music. Karl Ackermann (All About Jazz), wrote of the latest of Gluck’s five recordings: “As a composer and player, Gluck ranks with the likes of Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor… Something Quiet is completely original, artistically spontaneous, and intellectually challenging.” ^[1] Allan Kozinn (New York Times) wrote that Gluck is “an accomplished jazz pianist” who played with “virtuosic fluidity.” ^[2] Keyboard magazine named him June 2009 “Unsigned Artist of the Month.” Gluck’s current musical collaborators include saxophonists Joe Giardullo and Ras Moshe, bassists Christopher Dean Sullivan and Michael Bisio, drummer Dean Sharp, and computer musician/composer Neil Rolnick.

Raised in New York as a conservatory student and political activist, Gluck spent many years away from music, leading a life as a rabbi. Bob Gluck’s return to composing electronic music in 1995 and to the piano in 2005 marked a new beginning in his unusual career as a musician, educator, and writer. With influences as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Jimi Hendrix, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gluck has discovered a way to marry interests in electronic music with his love of jazz. Gluck designs his own software interfaces for interactive musical performance and multimedia installation,^[3] including the sound installations 'Layered Histories' (2004), an immersive sound and video environment with Cynthia Rubin ^[4] and 'Sounds of a Community' (2002), in which visitors trigger and shape recorded sounds by interacting with electronic musical sculptures.^[5]

Gluck's musical training is from the Juilliard, Manhattan and Crane schools of music and he holds degrees from the University at Albany, Yeshiva University's Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (MHL, title of Rabbi) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (MFA). His music has been performed internationally. His writings ^[6] have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Leonardo Music Journal, Leonardo, Organized Sound, Tav +, Journal SEAMUS, Review Zaman (France), Magham (Iran), Ideas Sonicas (Mexico), and elsewhere. He is author of “You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band” (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). Bob Gluck is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at The University at Albany.^[7]

Published works

• Stories Heard and Retold (1998) ^[8]
• Electric Songs (2001) ^[9]
• Electric Brew (2007) ^[10]
• Sideways (2008) ^[11]
• Something Quiet (2011) ^[12]
• Extended Family (Neil Rolnick, 2011) ^[13]
• Returning (2011) ^[14]

References