American concert pianist and composer Bruce Brubaker has spent more than 20 years studying and interpreting the music of the master minimalist Philip Glass. A former student and teacher at New York’s renowned Juilliard School, Brubaker’s approach to Glass’s compositions is similar to that of the remix in electronic music.

“Minimalist music is like the sound of being conscious”

Where a dance producer takes the elements of another artist’s work and recreates a new version in their own image, so in Brubaker’s classical world one composer can re-imagine the music of another, breathing new life into the work through previously unexplored approaches.

Today on NOWNESS the Iowa-born Brubaker shares a previously unseen performance of “Metamorphosis 2,” one of many reinterpretations that make up his new album Glass Piano. While the piece is a reimagining of Glass’s 1989 composition of the same name, a work originally inspired by Franz Kafka’s story of a travelling salesman who turns into an insect, narrative is seldom a part of minimalism. “It’s not [a type of] music that necessarily tells a story,” says Brubaker. “It’s more like the sound of being conscious.”