Musicatlas
Music
Discography: Sonic Stock (Centaur Records).
Life
Brian P. Gillett was born in 1972 and currently lives in New York City. His unique Neo-Romantic style often resonates Judaic tonality. While Gillett is a secular Jewish composer, Eastern European elements appear instinctively woven into nearly all of his works.
He is a self taught composer and pianist. His talent as a composer surfaced by necessity while an adolescent when he overzealously scheduled too many piano performances for the same retirement community. With multiple performances programmed and a limited piano repertoire, his adeptness for improvisation and composition surfaced trial-by-fire.
While a student at Oberlin College, he continued formal training in piano performance, but his development as a composer remained self-directed. During this time, he performed original works and improvisations for solo piano at various venues throughout the East coast. Concealing a small clock in the piano’s performer side ledge, he secretly improvised, at times, entire concerts. After establishing credibility as a solo performer and composer, he revealed the improvisatory nature of his performances and continued explicitly performing piano improvisation. His facility with extemporization colored his development as a composer, and an improvisatory character underlies even his most structured compositions.
During his studies at Oberlin, he developed an interest in the Biologic Sciences. In 1995, he enrolled in McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, PQ. Drawing from his experiences in the hospitals of Montreal, he composed works for voice, electronic media, solo instruments and chamber ensembles. Four years later, he arrived in New York as both a composer and medical doctor.
The integration of two ostensibly disparate worlds, Art and Science, into one balanced texture is also paralleled in his compositional style. Rooted in extemporization, and often comprised of dissimilar sounds, his rich sonic textures fuse elements of romanticism and the avant-garde.