Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

Tom Bruce is an electronic musician and sound designer working in Ithaca, NY. He plays a variety of hardware and software (primarily iPad-based) synthesizers

Tom performs solo and in some notable collaborations:

Tom has appeared at the Northeast Electro-music Festival (NEEMFest), at Mountain Skies in Black Mountain/Asheville NC, at EEEMFest (in Rutherford, NJ), and at the Cosmic Crossings series in the Princeton/Philadelphia area. He played for an audience of electronic musicians, acousticians, engineers, and social scientists at the Cornell-sponsored Upstate Sound Meetup in Ithaca. He’s appeared twice on WPRB radio in Princeton for live studio performances, and is a founding member of the Bleep Salon electronic music collective in Ithaca. His solo music and collaborations show up from time to time on WPRB, WDIY, WMUH, electro-music.com, and Radio Spiral. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has performed extensively via audio and video livestream on electro-music.com, Nick’s Virtual Garage, and Radio Spiral.

As a producer, he started the Ithaca Electrozone and produced and designed its Big EZ festival in 2018. Tom was the production coordinator for the Northeast Electro-music Festival from 2017 to 2022.

In late 2022, Tom and his partner-in-crime Rob Snyder (performing as High Anxiety Cabaret) took fourth place in an international competition for music produced via collaboration over the Internet. A video using that music is here. Tom and Charles Shriner (performing as Walmort Portrait Studio) won a runner-up prize in the same contest; the video of that livestreamed performance is here.

Past lives

In 1992, Tom co-founded Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, which he directed for 27 years. It now serves 40 million people from 240 or more countries each year. He was the author of the first Web browser for Microsoft Windows. In 2015, the ABA Journal named him one of the 50 most innovative individuals in the American legal profession, though he has no law degree. He’s worked on legal information projects in the US, UK, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Japan, and the Seychelles. Tom has twice testified before Congress, spoken at the UN and the Interparliamentary Union, and been an invited expert for the Hague Conference on Private International Law and the European Commission. An influential paper on metadata quality that he co-authored in 2004 has been cited well over 350 times in fields ranging from library and information science to public health and the management of cultural institutions. More information about that is here, and here, and here if you’re interested.

Before that, Tom worked as a lighting director for various jazz groups, and as stage- and production manager for a number of theater and opera companies in the US — including, among many others, the Yale Repertory Theater, the American Repertory Theater, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, the Monadnock Music Festival, and the Miami Opera — where he worked closely with directors Alvin Epstein, Nathaniel Merrill, and John Madden. A production of Don Giovanni he did with Peter Sellars and Edward Gorey was hailed as “an act of artistic vandalism” in Opera News (he was the lighting designer). He worked on three of the first four productions of Mahagonny in the United States, as assistant lighting designer, stage manager, and prop builder respectively. He once walked across the top of the proscenium arch at the Metropolitan Opera, an experience he would not care to repeat.

Tom was the Director of Special Technical Projects for the multi-venue Spoleto Festival USA for its first three seasons in the US, and stage-managed premieres of a number of new plays and operas including Jules Feiffer’s Grownups , and Robert Ward‘s disastrous Minutes ’til Midnight, as well as the exploratory workshop versions of Bill Neill’s Devil’s Stocking and Carlisle Floyd’s Willie Stark. He also wrangled a series of industrial shows for Eastern Airlines and for IBM. He has a degree in stage management from the Yale Drama School, where he received the Bert Gruver Prize.

Online presence

Links to pictures and videos appear elsewhere on this site.

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