Composer, instrument designer, and musicologist Brian Baumbusch’s work, while innovative within the global contemporary music community, is deeply in dialogue with cross-cultural exchanges. Born April 23rd, 1987, Baumbusch's compositional work is centered on developing alternative acoustics paradigms through the creation of new instruments and tuning systems, and originating new performance practices that feature computer-assisted live performance and recording projects in order to achieve performances of inconspicuously complex polytempo music.
Between 2007 and 2010, Baumbusch was deeply engaged in ethnomusicological field work centered on Argentine-Quechua folklore music. From 2012 to the present, Baumbusch has collaborated with several of Bali’s leading performing ensembles, and his works have premiered at the Bali Arts Festival.
At the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baumbusch began creating new compositions that performers could collaborate on remotely by recording in isolation to individualized click tracks in order to cooperatively create complex polytempo structures. These include the symphonic length Isotropes, recorded by roughly 150 musicians between 2020 and 2021, and the evening length Polytempo Music, designed as a VR experience where the listener can interact with the music in an immersive 3D spatial audio-visual environment.
In early 2022, Baumbusch donated two sets of new percussion instruments inspired by Indonesian gamelan instruments, which Baumbusch designed and built between 2010 and 2021, to the Balinese performing ensemble Nata Swara directed by Putu Septa. Nata Swara's recordings of Baumbusch's Prisms for Gene Davis and Hydrogen(2)Oxygen (in collaboration with the JACK Quartet) are featured on the 2023 album Chemistry for Gamelan and String Quartet on New World Records.
Baumbusch's work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and New Music USA, among others.