Greg Bruce

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Canada °1983
research interests: artistic research, electroacoustic music, improvisation, classical performance practice, saxophone, Augmented Instruments, analogue electronics, analogue vs digital, research-creation
affiliation: University of Toronto
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Greg Bruce is an improvisor, composer, and saxophonist searching for new sounds and modes of performance through obsolete technology. His work is an anarchistic amalgam of contemporary classical techniques, improvised folk melodies, and minimalist ostinati. He harnesses the forgotten power of acoustic feedback, contact microphones, and tape media, using breath energy to drive his saxophones through visceral machines. Through this work he investigates the human/machine dialectic and seeks to invoke a post-digital future: when art and science are noisily wrested from their slavery to the algorithm.

Hailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Greg is a Doctor of Musical Arts who has spent over 20 years in the music industry as a side-musician, soloist, composer/arranger, and band leader. During this time he has drawn on his training in classical and jazz to record, tour, and perform in every setting imaginable: from conferences in the US, to street parties in Canada, to palaces in Russia.

Greg earned his DMA form the University of Toronto, where he designed a microphone-augmented saxophone capable of producing controlled, dynamic, acoustic feedback tones that act independently of its conventional sound. Greg carried out this innovative research under a two-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.

As an educator, Greg has been teaching for over 15 years. He has worked as an instructor at Memorial University and has maintained a private studio throughout his teaching career. He has adjudicated festivals and competitions, and has led countless masterclasses and workshops on topics such as saxophone technique, improvisation, electroacoustic music, and research-creation. In the 23/24 academic year, Greg worked as an applied music instructor at the College of the North Atlantic in St. John’s, and now works full time as a SSHRC postdoctoral scholar at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.

research

research expositions

  • Feedback Saxophone: Expanding the Microphonic Process in Post-Digital Research-Creation (2024) author(s): Greg Bruce published in: Research Catalogue
    The microphonic process is the term I use to encapsulate how microphones, loudspeakers, and related media are used to support, extend, and innovate musical practice. In this research-creation thesis, I contextualize, document, and analyze my own application of the microphonic process – feedback saxophone. My feedback saxophone system combines the unique characteristics of the tenor saxophone with the idiosyncrasies of various microphones and loudspeakers to produce and manipulate acoustic feedback. While there are examples of similar systems, there is no standardization and little documentation exists outside of audio recordings. Furthermore, my work employs feedback in a systematized fashion that challenges its conventional, indeterminate use in performance and composition. To support this research-creation, I discuss the history of the microphonic process, examine contemporary “microphonic” practices, and use these findings to describe and analyze my own works. For the history of the microphonic process, I discuss how microphone amplification changed popular vocal technique through the work of early-microphone singer Bing Crosby. I then discuss how microphonic instrumentaria were variously employed by avant-garde and popular artists using the examples of Mikrophonie I by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hugh Davies’ feedback work Quintet, and the guitar-feedback practice of Jimi Hendrix. Following this discussion of instrumentaria, I establish the contemporary context in which my research-creation occurs by examining two present-day microphonic saxophonists, Colin Stetson and John Butcher. I use their distinct electroacoustic practices as a springboard to explain recent musical-technological trends: from the accelerating consumption of digital media in the new paradigm of sound, to the reactionary concepts of post-digitalism and the minimally augmented instrument. Lastly, I describe the creation of three concert etudes for my post-digital, minimally augmented feedback saxophone system, and critically examine the new works’ processes of creation, musical materials, and aesthetics.
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