Robert Gluck is a pianist and composer whose repertoire spans jazz, live electronic music, and avant-garde concert music. Karl Ackermann (All About Jazz), wrote of the latest of Gluck’s five recordings: “As a composer and player, Gluck ranks with the likes of Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor… Something Quiet is completely original, artistically spontaneous, and intellectually challenging.” Allan Kozinn (New York Times) wrote that Gluck is “an accomplished jazz pianist” who played with “virtuosic fluidity.” Keyboard magazine named him June 2009 “Unsigned Artist of the Month.” Gluck’s current musical collaborators include saxophonists Joe Giardullo and Ras Moshe, bassists Christopher Dean Sullivan and Michael Bisio, drummer Dean Sharp, and computer musician/composer Neil Rolnick.

Raised in New York as a conservatory student and political activist, Gluck spent many years away from music, leading a life as a rabbi. Bob Gluck’s return to composing electronic music in 1995 and to the piano in 2005 marked a new beginning in his unusual career as a musician, educator, and writer. With influences as diverse as Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock

Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock is an American pianist, bandleader and composer. As part of Miles Davis's "second great quintet," Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound...

, Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...

, Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

, Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s....

, John Coltrane

John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and later was at the forefront of free jazz...

, and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

, Gluck has discovered a way to marry interests in electronic music with his love of jazz. Gluck designs his own software interfaces for interactive musical performance and multimedia installation, including the sound installations 'Layered Histories' (2004), an immersive sound and video environment with Cynthia Rubin and 'Sounds of a Community' (2002), in which visitors trigger and shape recorded sounds by interacting with electronic musical sculptures.

Gluck's musical training is from the Juilliard, Manhattan and Crane schools of music and he holds degrees from the University at Albany, Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University is a private university in New York City, with six campuses in New York and one in Israel. Founded in 1886, it is a research university ranked as 45th in the US among national universities by U.S. News & World Report in 2012...

's Wurzweiler School of Social Work

Wurzweiler School of Social Work

The Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University was founded in 1957. It is a methods-based institution offering concentrations in clinical casework, social group work, and community social work. Fieldwork is an integral part of the curriculum...

, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College , is located in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, about 10 miles north of central Philadelphia. RRC is the only seminary affiliated with Reconstructionist Judaism. It is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and...

 (MHL, title of Rabbi) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...

(MFA). His music has been performed internationally. His writings have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Leonardo Music Journal, Leonardo, Organized Sound, Tav +, Journal SEAMUS, Review Zaman (France), Magham (Iran), Ideas Sonicas (Mexico), and elsewhere. He is author of “You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band” (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). Bob Gluck is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at The University at Albany.

Published works

• Stories Heard and Retold (1998)
• Electric Songs (2001)
• Electric Brew (2007)
• Sideways (2008)
• Something Quiet (2011)
• Extended Family (Neil Rolnick, 2011)
• Returning (2011)