Bruce Adolphe - Piano Puzzler

I first heard of Bruce Adolphe on the “Piano Puzzler” on KHFM, the classical radio station. I thought his work sounded really cool – he creates a Piano Puzzler for KHFM every few days. The Piano Puzzler is a song he remixes so that it mimics the distinct style of a composer. The time that I heard the Piano Puzzler, he had remixed the song “If I Only Had A Brain,” from the Wizard of Oz, into the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. The reason it is called the Piano Puzzler on KHFM is because they call someone up, and play the Piano Puzzler for them, and then the contestant on the phone has to guess what song it is, and which composer is being mimicked. If they do, they usually win some sort of prize, but it’s really hard to do. I couldn’t even guess it until they told me what it was at the end. It was pretty cool, so I thought I’d look up a little bit about him.

Bruce Adolphe was born in 1955, and has lived in the U.S. all his life. He is a composer and pianist, and has been doing the Piano Puzzler ever it started on National Public Radio. He has composed pieces for many different symphonies and orchestras, even including the National Symphony and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, has composed things from operas to violin concertos. Below is a picture of Bruce Adolphe:

Some past Piano Puzzlers Bruce Adolphe has composed include “Til There Was You,” from the Music Man (musical), “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Click the link below to go to a site of many of the recent Piano Puzzlers, and if you scroll down to March 9^th, 2011, you can hear the exact same one I heard of “If I Only Had Brain,” even though I just gave it away…but you can still guess the other ones, and at the end they tell you both the piece and mimicked-composer:

http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/podcast/piano_puzzler/