Arts and Entertainment

Mulmur composer Bruce Ley brings listeners on a musical journey in latest work

May 29, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Bruce Ley is a well-known musician, music arranger, composer and recorder, working out of his recording studio at his home in Mulmur.

Over his life, Ley has performed far and wide in Canada and the U.S. Locally and for some years, Ley and Larry Kurtz were the duo Trouble and Strife. 

To interview Bruce Ley about his current projects in music is to follow the history of popular music over a number of decades. From when he was in his teens, Bruce was not in high school, he was in a band, in a van, travelling and performing. There was always a stack of books coming with him so that he could study music seriously.

“I started playing with a band since I was 17 or 18. I always had an interest in 20th century music. I was on the road early but I was the guy in the van – I was the one telling everybody what notes to play,” Ley told the Citizen during a telephone interview from his studio. 

We were there to talk about his latest big composition, his Orchestral Suite No. 1. It is comparable in size and length, as he noted, to the Nutcracker Suite or Firebird, requiring as many as 130 musicians, signifying the venue and orchestra needed to perform it. Ley’s ideal venue of choice is The Rotterdam Concert Hall De Doelen in Holland, where the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra regularly perform and where Ley has attended concerts.

The conversations between the sections of the orchestra are sometimes dramatic and strident; other moments are wonderfully kind and lyrical, taking the listener through a story, perhaps the story of mankind itself. Nearly an hour long, Ley’s opus ends with passages, riveting to the listener as they march and dance to sum up the composer’s theme.

“There is a story a way through but you tell it to yourself,” he said. “It is tense at times – I can’t write what’s not there.”

He continued by telling us that his work was affected by what was going on 400 years ago when there was much less tension, when “people understood their place in the social structure. Now we’re restless; we’re frustrated.”

His comment on 20th-century composers was that Leonard Bernstein wrote The Age of Anxiety. Ley loves Russian music wherein hovers a sense of humour, coming from the idea that things were so bad they might just as well seek for humour. These were early influences.

“My parents had three albums,” Ley recalled. “Nutcracker, Oklahoma and Carousel. There was the influence of cartoon music too, which was classical music and I loved it and I hear it still.”

The process of writing this Orchestral Suite was a long writing that took Ley six months. As it stands at eight segments in order from one to eight, it has been reorganized from its original sequence.

“There is some sort of idea, looking for a sort of resolution,” he added, “section eight [the finale] gets frantic – it’s a big ending.”

To create levity in a heavy piece, Ley brings in the bass clarinet for comedy and the bassoon. When he listens to music, pictures come to mind; but this is not about how he feels. He wants the listener to pick up their own pictures, and he wonders if this work could excite dance, as a possibility for a ballet. 

“I would love to get together with a classical choreographer,” came the ambition.

Before composing this Suite, Ley wrote a symphony a year ago and has added a collection of string quartets – a woodwind quintet.

He remarked about the musicians who would perform his work, saying they would have to be professional classical musicians, pointing out that the four flutes within the whole Suite would be too difficult for even talented amateurs.

“I don’t have to write difficult music,” he commented, as a person who has written a great many songs in other genres. This has been a time when he wanted to write classical music – music for his own sake.

“The sad thing is, it’s taken me this long. When I was 25, young people wanted to be with me because I was cool. I was playing rock and roll. In my 30s, I turned to country music in Nashville, with some really big names [including Don Everly, Chet Atkins and Peggy Lee].

“There was a lot to learn and I was very lucky to be around them.”

He finds himself interested in “music I don’t understand. I really like Indian music, any foreign music I don’t understand and don’t want to.”

If it happened that Bruce Ley’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 was performed as it should be, what would bring people to hear and see it?

“The only reason is because it’s good,” he is confident. “Worthy of a ticket price. I have been able to support my family by music, not just because I was lucky – I worked hard. People should come because it’s good. I don’t shy away from saying that.”

He said, “I think it’s really good – it’s just music.” 

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