Brian Ciach, DM, May 2011
Road Trip (2010)
Indiana University New Music Ensemble
David Dzubay, conductor
Sharon Harms, mezzo solo
Performed on April 21, 2011; Auer Hall, Indiana University
Brian Ciach (pronounced “SIGH-ack“, born 1977) is enjoying an active career in alternative classical music. A native of Philadelphia, he has heard and performed his music across the United States, in Berlin, Germany, and Pavia, Italy. The 2009 premiere of his work Strange Assortments by the Indiana University Percussion Ensemble was “a highlight among highlights in an extremely well-executed program” (Peter Jacobi, Bloomington Herald Times). Brian’s Second Piano Sonata has received both national and international recognition, winning the 2008 National Federation of Music Clubs Emil and Ruth Beyer Composition Award and the 2011 American Liszt Society’s Bicentennial Composition Competition. Also a composer of electronic music, his work Waterclocks was selected for a performance at the 2009 SEAMUS (Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States) National Conference.
Brian is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in music composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he was also an Associate Instructor in music theory. He studied composition with P.Q. Phan, Claude Baker, Don Freund, John Gibson (electro-acoustic), Jeffrey Hass (electro-acoustic), and Sven-David Sandström at IU, with Samuel Adler at the Freie Universität Berlin, with Maurice Wright, Matthew Greenbaum, and Richard Brodhead at Temple University, and privately with Richard Wernick. He studied piano with Charles Abramovic, Lambert Orkis, and Ignat Solzhenitsyn at Temple University, and at the Darlington Arts Center with Benjamin Whitten and Harue Sato.
As an active new music pianist, Brian has premiered Plaints and Airs by Maurice Wright in Carnegie Hall and recorded a CD of works by Emiliano Pardo-Tristán entitled Contemporary Chamber Music from Panama. His Master’s degree piano recital at Temple University included a from-memory performance of Richard Wernick’s Piano Sonata No. 1, a performance that received an international review by Bernard Jacobson, who said: “Brian Ciach is not a master merely in the sense of academic certification, but a pianist, and a musician, you will want to get to know. I assure you that it is a name you will be hearing much of in the not too distant future.”