Brian Baumbusch: "Polytempo Music" - A new interactive VR music application
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Brian Baumbusch is a composer, instrument designer, and musicologist whose "harmonically vivid... intense... simmering" (NY Times) compositions push the boundaries of new music. His works engage the use of new technologies while also drawing on deep cross-cultural histories. His 2015 composition, Hydrogen(2)Oxygen written for the JACK Quartet and Lightbulb Ensemble, centered on a set of new percussion instruments that Baumbusch designed and built between 2011 and 2014, is described by the Washington Post as being "exuberantly complex, maddeningly beautiful, and as intoxicating as a drug." He has headlined performances at the Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar, The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, The Clarice Smith Center of Maryland, and The Yerba Buena Center of San Francisco, among others. He has collaborated with musicians such as I Made Subandi, The JACK Quartet, Pauline Oliveros, The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, The Cal State Fullerton Wind Symphony, and the Balinese ensemble Nata Swara, among others.
Baumbusch has conducted extensive research regarding the music from central Argentina, as well as the music of Bali. In 2009, he founded the Cacho Ensemble in Madrid alongside composer José Luis Merlín, dedicated to performing Argentinean folk music from the regions of Santiago del Estero, Mendoza, San Luis, and San Juan. The group performed in Europe and the United States between 2006 and 2011. In 2010, Baumbusch completed the first full English translation of Atahualpa Yupanqui's epic poem El payador perseguido. The translation was presented alongside a performance by Baumbusch of Yupanqui's 45 minute musical rendition of El Payador Perseguido at the Embassy of Argentina in Washington D.C. in 2011, sponsored by the cultural attaché of the embassy, Francisco Achaval. Achaval described Baumbusch’s playing as embodying “supurb technique which, while listening, took me back to the deep heartland of my country; he has found a way to sing zambas from the bottom of his soul.”
Baumbusch has also performed with many Balinese gamelan groups across the U.S., including Sekar Jaya of the Bay Area, Dharma Swara of New York, and Galak Tikka of Boston, and the Lightbulb Ensemble, which Baumbusch founded in 2013 to perform on new percussion instruments that Baumbusch built inspired by Indonesian gamelan instruments. Balinese scholar, author, and choreographer Dr. I Made Bandem describes Baumbusch as “a serious musician and composer whose profound understanding of Balinese music, dance, and culture has contributed a lot to the development of Balinese music.” Since 2014, Baumbusch has been the director of the U.C. Santa Cruz Balinese Gamelan ensemble, and he founded the Santa Clara University Balinese Gamelan ensemble in 2016.
In 2012, Baumbusch produced a collaboration with the JACK Quartet and the Balinese ensemble Gamelan Makaradhwaja, directed by Dr. I Made Bandem and choreographer Dr. Suasthi Bandem. This collaboration premiered at the Bali Arts Festival in June, 2012. The Jakarta Post described the premiere saying "Baumbusch's overture was a grand and rich musical epic and instantly drew the crowd’s amazement. Its patterns were intricate, a testament of Baumbusch’s virtuosity and his ability to push the musicians to reveal the astounding ability of their instruments." Additionally, Baumbusch’s arrangements of several traditional gamelan pieces for string quartet are described by David Harrington (violinist and director of the Kronos Quartet) as “one of the finest attempts to bring the string quartet into the world of Gamelan music. For a composer so youthful to possess this expertise is a very hopeful sign.”