Bruce Adolphe (born May 31, 1955) is a composer, music scholar, the author of several books on music, and pianist.[1] He is currently Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where he has been a key figure since 1992. Adolphe performs his weekly "Piano Puzzler" segment on the nationally broadcast Performance Today classical music radio program hosted by Fred Child. "Piano Puzzler" was on National Public Radio starting in 2002, and is now on American Public Media. The program is also available as a podcast and from iTunes. Mr. Adolphe was also founding artistic director of Off the Hook Arts Festival, an interdisciplinary festival combining music, science, and visual arts, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, from 2010 to 2022.
Adolphe's recent books include Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press in the Elements series on Imagination and Creativity, edited by Anna Abraham. In 2021, Oxford University Press published an expanded third edition of Adolphe's book The Mind's Ear:Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Composers, Performers, and Listeners. Adolphe contributed a chapter to The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights, published in 2023 and he contributed a chapter to the OUP publication Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal, 2019, edited by Nalbantian and Matthews.