Composer computer-musician multiple-flutist improvisor and educator. Bruce Gremo recently completed work at Daystar Academy, a private bilingual IB school in Beijing. There he developed a unique G2-G10 music program oriented to ear-training, composing and improvising, Sound Based inquiry and Found Sound performance; in a word, enlightened listening. He innovated a computer music lab approach to teaching music to Middle School students at the same school. This is not conservatory style teaching; the focus is on composition, improvisation, and listening skills through facilitating relatively quick productivity. Assuming students already have laptop computers, they use their laptops as instruments in performance, as composing and listening tools, and as a research vehicle. They have performance experience in laptop ensembles. A solution for high educational yield at little expense.
As a flutist, he has worked as a principal orchestra flutist, a solo recitalist, a chamber musician, a band member, a studio sideman and an all-purpose free improvisor. As a multiple flutist he has been a performer on the bass and alto flute, alto shakulute, Japanese shakuhachi, bansuri, glissando head joint flute, and Chinese Xun. Since the late 1990s, he has composed interactive computer applications that include pitch-tracking intensive applications, and micro-controllers using the Cilia, his patented flute-controller instrument.
He was a founding member of the Syneme Telemusic Ensemble, a studio located at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing that facilitated tele-performances with collaborators from around the globe on an IPv6 network. His current music involves audio driven animation improvisation. He has long collaborated in other disciplines such as dance, installation, theater, and interactive video. A graduate level composer trained in the academy and experienced as working musician, he is well versed in acoustic music as well.
An experienced performer, he was the first musician to perform live computer and free improvisation at the National Center for the Performing Arts (aka the Egg), the august and conservative flagship venue of the Chinese government across form the Forbidden City. He has been a chamber music soloist with The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, soloist with orchestra at Wien Modern and the BBC Proms Festival at the Royal Albert Hall. He has improvised at the Knitting Factory Jazz Festival under Ornette Coleman’s direction. He participated in the punk / alternative movement during a heyday period at the Beijing club D-22. He toured over fourteen months as synthesiser programmer and soloist with the Peter Sellars production of the KunQu opera, The Peony Pavilion.
He has second Masters Degree in Philosophy; music for him has always been an inquisitive form.
Gremo develops concert formats where different performance practices meet; classical repertoire and improvisation, hi-tech electronic and acoustic, western and eastern, old and new, functional and ecstatic, auditory and visual. These interests in contraries and contradictions are born from his practical education as a participant in the free improvisation and experimental music scene in New York beginning in the late 1980s, where he was based until he relocated to Beijing in 2006.
Recipient of numerous awards, his music has been performed around the world.