about

Bruce Crossman (photos: Vincent Tay)

Bruce Crossman is an Australian composer whose sound world embraces Asian traditional musics, free form improvisation, and European avant-garde influenced interval-colour sonority towards a personal Pacific identity.

His music explores Asian-Pacific influences such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino gong resonances with living timbre-colour changes and harmonic colour sonority emphasis in Heaven to Earth Border House (2019-20), Shy Like Blushing Flowers (2017), Gentleness-Suddenness (2012), Double Resonances (2008) and Daragang Magayon Cantata (2001). Crossman’s aesthetic is influenced by cross-disciplinary ideas from Chinese esthetics, Japanese aesthetics and architecture, Korean contemporary architecture and Gugak nonghyeon aesthetics, Australian poetry, abstract and traditional East Asian visual arts, and the living ecology of Mulgoa Nature Reserve bush in Western Sydney.

Crossman’s music has been featured throughout the Asia-Pacific region including at the ISCM World Music Days (Beijing, Sydney), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), Asian Composers League Festival (Taiwan), Asian Music Week (Japan), Tunugan (Philippines), Puente Festival Interoceánico (Chile), and Pacific Rim Music Festival (USA). He has won several awards including the Queensland Philharmonic’s Corbould Prize, a Finalist Nomination for Vocal or Choral Work of the Year at the 2007 Australian Classical Music Awards, and Researcher of the Year 2019 (Practice-based Research) in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. Filigree Films have published a DVD of the music-theatre work Gentleness-Suddenness (2014). Australian publisher Wirripang have released several discs of his music including an album of compositions, Double Resonances (2008), and one of piano improvisations with multi-instrumentalist Michael Atherton, Resophonica (2009). Prestigious international label Navona Records (USA) have released his albums Living Colours: Pacific Sounds and Spirit (2017) and Heaven to Earth Border House (2021).

As a composer-researcher he has organized multiple research projects linking practice and scholarship with international linkage and publication outcomes (performance-based and refereed). Highlights include, working with Grawemeyer Award winner Chinary Ung (USA) at Aurora Festival 2008 and invitations as a Collaborator, Aichi University of the Arts, Japan in 2015, Composer, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan in 2019, Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Seoul National University, South Korea in 2022, and advisory work for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York (USA).

Crossman was born in Auckland in 1961. He studied composition with Ross Edwards, Andrew Schultz, David Blake, and Jack Speirs. His qualifications include a Doctor of Creative Arts from Wollongong University, Master of Philosophy from York University and Master of Music (Distinction) from Otago University. He holds the position of Associate Professor (Music) and is the Coordinator of Composition in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.