Oakland, CA-based oboist Kyle Bruckmann tramples genre boundaries in widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator and New Music specialist. His creative output – extending from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground – can be heard on more than 80 recordings from labels such as New World, Hat Art, Carrier, New Focus, Clean Feed, Another Timbre and Sick Room. His ensemble affiliations currently include Splinter Reeds, sfSound, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, Quinteto Latino, and the Stockton Symphony; the most significant projects he has led or collaboratively founded include Degradient, EKG, Lozenge, and Wrack. He is Assistant Professor of Practice in Oboe and Contemporary Music at University of the Pacific, and also teaches at UC Santa Cruz, Davis and Berkeley.

Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003, he has performed as a substitute with the San Francisco Symphony and most of the area’s regional orchestras while remaining active within an international community of improvisers and sound artists. From 1996 until his Western relocation, he was a fixture in Chicago’s thriving experimental music scene. Thanks to his uncommon distinction as an improvising oboist, he has performed and/or recorded with Creative Music progenitors Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton and George Lewis, and worked extensively as a sideman for bandleaders such as Lisa Mezzacappa, Aaron Novik, Andrew Raffo Dewar and Myra Melford. He has also premiered dozens of works as a soloist and chamber musician by composers including Linda Bouchard, Chris Brown, Christopher Burns, Eoin Callery, Gabriela Lena Frank, José-Luis Hurtado, Maija Hynninen, Matt Ingalls, Christopher Wendell Jones, Michelle Lou, Sky Macklay, Paula Matthusen, Amadeus Regucera, Matt Sandahl, Ken Ueno, Theresa Wong, and Eric Wubbels.

Bruckmann earned undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Rice University in Houston, studying oboe with Robert Atherholt, serving as music director of campus radio station KTRU, and achieving academic distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his M.M. in 1996 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied oboe performance with Harry Sargous and contemporary improvisation with Ed Sarath.

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