Brian Ciach (pronounced “sigh-ack“, born 1977) is a composer and pianist from Philadelphia currently teaching music theory, composition, and electronic music as an Assistant Professor at Murray State University. His music is evocative and attractive in its imagery, often using intrepid instrumentation and imaginative formal concepts woven from a free and accessible tonal language. Brian has written a Vegetable Requiem for hand-made vegetable instruments, a second piano sonata that runs out of notes, and Road Trip for soprano and chamber orchestra presenting text set in two dramatically different ways. Collective Uncommon: Seven Orchestral Studies on Medical Oddities, his Indiana University dissertation inspired by curiosities found in the Mütter museum, received this review: "Ciach was the composer most intent upon letting his imagination run wild all over the music (hence the cabbages and dolls), but he also had the strongest sense of how to create layers of sounds, rather than the clusters that some of the others favored" (Hubbard, Pioneer Press). Brian’s Second Piano Sonata has received both national and international recognition, winning the 2008 National Federation of Music Clubs Emil and Ruth Beyer Composition Award and the 2011 American Liszt Society’s Bicentennial Composition Competition. Also a composer of electronic music, his work Waterclocks was selected for a performance at the 2009 SEAMUS (Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States) National Conference. Alarm Will Sound and the Minnesota Orchestra, sopranos Sharon Harms and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, and pianists Charlie Abramovic and Matthew Gianforte, among many others, have premiered his music.
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