Biography

Bruce Hobson, who has taught piano privately in Manchester, Vermont, was born in 1943 in Hartford, Connecticut, where he studied piano and trumpet at the Hartt School of Music in the 1950s. During studies at Columbia University and the New England Conservatory of Music, his composition teachers included Otto Luening, Chou Wen Chung, and Malcolm Peyton.

Mr. Hobson's works are published by Equinox Music and Mobart Music Publications. Equinox Music is serving as both publisher and recording company for Mr. Hobson's compositions recorded on his CDs 0101, 0102, and 0104. Conceived in the early 1990s, this recording project has taken Mr. Hobson to Budapest, Warsaw, New York City, Vienna, Cracow, San Francisco and also Bratislava, where his Three for Two Trumpets and Orchestra and Concerto for Orchestra were recorded for Vienna Modern Masters CDs 3017 and 3024 respectively. Mr. Hobson has held teaching fellowships at Columbia University and the University of Michigan.

Selections from the recordings of Mr. Hobson's music have been broadcast on several stations in the United States and Europe, and he has been the featured composer in contemporary music broadcasts from WMHT in Albany, NY and from the Concert Zender in the Netherlands (on radio and cybercast on the Internet to a world wide audience). All of Mr. Hobson’s recordings are being streamed from numerous streaming services including iTunes, Amazon mp3, and Spotify.

Equinox Music’s YouTube Channel presents several videos of Hobson’s works.

Performances of his works have been given by the San Francisco Center for New Music, the I.S.C.M., the Donnell Library Composers Forum, the New England Conservatory of Music, the Guild of Composers, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Capella Cracoviensis Orchestra. The first of his Two Lyric Pieces has been recorded by Michael Arnowitt for Ursa Minor Records; his Trio 1966 was selected to represent Vermont at a Bicentennial concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Equinox Music is currently offering five compact discs of Mr. Hobson's compositions with ensembles varying from solo piano to large orchestra. The music is performed by some of the world's foremost interpreters of contemporary music including Mikel Toms, Margaret Kampmeier, Jan Opalach, Jacques-Louis Monod, Rolf Schulte, Christopher Oldfather, and John Whitfield.

Mr. Hobson has lived in southern Vermont since 1973. While thus unintentionally following in the footsteps, geographically at least, of Carl Ruggles and Elliott Carter, Mr. Hobson has maintained musical ties with New York City by becoming a founding member of the Guild of Composers, a performing organization, and the Association for the Promotion of New Music, a music publisher.