Bruce Gbur is Assistant Professor of Double Reeds at Kansas State University. A native of Ohio, he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Music from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio (1979); a Master of Arts in Historical Musicology from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia (1991); and a Doctor of Musical Arts in Bassoon performance from the University of Georgia (2001). Bruce Gbur has been a member of the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Florida Symphony Orchestra, as well as an extra player with the Cleveland Orchestra. During his graduate studies Gbur performed as a bassoonist and contrabassoonist with every major orchestra in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Prior to coming to K-State Gbur taught at the State University of West Georgia in Carrollton and Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Gbur’s teaching duties at K-State include applied oboe, bassoon, and “early wind instruments,” i.e., recorder and Scottish highland bagpipes, teaching music history courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, coaching chamber ensembles, and directing the Collegium Musicum.
An active chamber musician, Bruce Gbur is a founding member of the Konza Prairie Chamber Players, the faculty wind quartet at K-State. He performs as the bassoonist of the Planel Trio with Margaret Marco (oboe) and Ellen Bottorff (piano), and is a founding member of Depraved Indifference, a professional bassoon quartet.
Gbur began writing program notes while an undergraduate student and has continued to enjoy this activity. He currently provides program notes for the New Hampshire Music Festival, the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center, and orchestras in Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. Gbur has written liner notes for ten compact discs, including one devoted to string chamber music of Charles Martin Loeffler, which were released on the Naxos label in August 2002.
Major areas of research interest include neglected solo and chamber works for double reeds, the music of German-American composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935), and the music of German composer Victor Bruns (1904-1996). Gbur has performed at the annual Conferences of the International Double Reed Society in 1984, 1996-1998, and 2001. His recital of original works for the contrabassoon, “Something Old, Something New, NOTHING Borrowed,” was one of only three contra recitals presented at the 2001 I.D.R.S. Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Bruce Gbur was initiated into the Beta Phi Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia at Baldwin-Wallace College on 8 April 1974. He was an active member of the Epsilon Lambda Chapter at UGA throughout his graduate work, and is currently the advisor of the Tau Chapter at KSU. In September 1999 he was appointed Governor of Province 7 (Kansas and Eastern Colorado) by the National Executive Committee of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, and in September 2000 he was appointed to the fraternity’s Arts Advocacy Committee.
Gbur’s hobbies include traveling, foreign languages, cooking, movies, and reading murder mysteries. He is the proud owner of Victor, a tri-color Welsh Pembroke Corgi.