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. 

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.”

Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.