Deborah Bradley-Kramer

Evening Division faculty member Deborah Bradley-Kramer, who received her PhD from New York University and also studied at the European Mozart Academy and is a lecturer in music at Columbia University and a founding member of MUSE Academy, a Pre-K-12 school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, that’s set to open in the fall of 2018. She’s also founder and pianist of the award-winning Moebius Ensemble, which champions American music and works by emerging, and SPEAKmusic, a collective of Columbia and Juilliard musicians and faculty who are dedicated to enlivening the world of classical music through innovative programming and interactive concert experiences.

As director of Columbia’s music performance program (1999-2013), Bradley-Kramer fostered a variety of programs and established the Jonathan D. Kramer Memorial Fund for Young Composers in memory of her late husband, longtime Columbia faculty member, composer, and music theorist Jonathan D. Kramer. She has given talks on American contemporary music, postmodern performance, and contemporary Russian music at conservatories all over the world; she also gave a talk on the importance of teaching music in Columbia’s core curriculum at the United Nations. She has contributed to international radio and film projects on classical music and for a documentary on Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova for Getzel Gordon Productions. In 2016 she presented invited papers at the College Music Societies (northeast and southern chapters) and at the International Society for the Study of Time at the University of Edinburgh.

Bradley-Kramer’s solo piano performances range from Baroque music and improvisation to contemporary music, including premieres of compositions written for her by such composers as Boris Tishchenko, Duncan Neilson, Jonathan Kramer, and recent Juilliard alumnus Chason Goldschmitz, and she maintains an active and varied performing schedule while fostering innovative programming and performing. Her CD of Jonathan Kramer’s chamber music with piano is forthcoming on Leonarda; her essay on performing postmodern piano music appears in Jonathan Kramer’s Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening (Bloomsbury Press, 2016).

Bradley-Kramer’s research interests include Baroque music, postmodern music, improvisation, fugue, Russian avant-garde of the Silver Age, the lost generation of Czech composers from the Holocaust, the Russian Jewish Folk Music Society, Russian and Bulgarian folk music, constructivism, surrealism, Russian and Czech poetry, film, and literature, Rom music of Central and Eastern Europe, music and memory, and music pedagogy.