Gerald Brennan

About Gerald Brennan, author, composer, recording artist

I was born on September 2, 1953, in Jessup, PA. At age two I moved to Dearborn, MI, where I lived with my family until my late teens. The eldest of six children, I went to Catholic school, and when my brain started working at about age 15, I left the Church, my youthful mind appalled by its many dogmas. Nor did the priests and nuns wish to indulge my curious nature. When we had philosophical questions, the answer was usually along the lines of “Shut up.” It was in high school that I began to write down the music in my head.
Wandering in the desert for many years, I drank heavily, experimented with drugs, and studied music, science and philosophy. Though I never had any formal music education, living in Ann
Arbor put many wonderful resources at my disposal, including many fine Steinway grands sprinkled merrily throughout the
University of Michigan campus back in the day when there didn’t need to be a lock on every door.
I became a good pianist in the following years, as well as composer. I had many musical adventures—breaking a Steinway grand playing Liszt at the University of Michigan music school, playing Liszt’s American Steinway at the Smithsonian Museum in an impromptu recital that drew quite a wondrous crowd.
I became a National Public Radio affiliate producer with WUOM, WVGR and WFUM out of the U-M. I produced hundreds of weekly programs in my decade there—including The
Musical Theatre, New Music, New Releases, From the Monophonic Era, Music of Our World, Excursions, and Nocturne.
In 1980 I organized the Ann Arbor-based Sinewave Studios for the development and propagation of new art music. I produced about 20 concerts and conducted the North American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Für kommende zeiten at the Detroit Institute of Art.
My writing career started in 1984 when I wrote and self-published a booklet on starting a classical record collection.
Borders Books agreed to carry it, and it finally made its way into the paws of a publisher. They asked me to expand it into a sure enough book and thus was born Classical Records, Starting Your
Collection. After it was published, I took it to the Ann Arbor News and asked them if they needed a music reviewer. Turned out they did, and so, all while I had the radio gig, I was reviewing the best acts in the world that came through town.
Before all that I worked in record stores, including the famous Liberty Music. I also sold pianos, moved pianos, sold sheet music, managed U-M’s record and sheet music store, and wrote for various national music journals.
In 1998, I was headhunted by a visionary fellow named Michael Erlewine, who decided that it would be a good idea to get hold of every album in the world and put every bit of information about it into a database. Eventually, the idea included taking a photo of the album and doing sound samples. They started with a core of a few music geeks and began by going through their own collections. The company Erlewine founded was called All Media Guide (www.allmusic.com), which became the world’s largest repository of product data and editorial information about music.
Erlewine asked me to assume the post of Director of Content of Classical Music at AMG, to create a department that would be devoted to classical music. I jumped at it, and in four years my amazing staff and I, along with scores of excellent writers, amassed the data, created the classical website, and produced the giant reference book, AMG Guide to Classical Music, which I edited and saw published in 2005. My mission was accomplished; my staff was a well-oiled machine and easily the best and happiest of all AMG’s departments. Then ‘investor fatigue’ set in among the shareholders and AMG was appointed a slick new president who knew little about what we did or why but was hired to sell the company at a good price to whomever, and fast. He instinctively disliked me and my open resistance to his schemes and I was fired. I had no hard feelings. I had completed my mission, and it was time to go.
Now I write music and books, make recordings, and give the rare recital.
Books include There was this guy once…. In that book there is no plot but many characters. Not exactly autobiography, but a case could be made. Also Prince of Pines, a dystopian male-adventure novel set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; The Complete Short Stories; the recent The Angel Jophiel, a fantasy novel about the classical music world and an angel sent to Earth to help rejuvenate the dying Arts, and A Song of Blood and Ashes, a vampire tale set in contemporary Ireland and Ann Arbor. Also, Classical Music &
Recordings–a primer, and Views & Reviews – Chronicles from the Twilight of the Golden Age of Classical Music.
Musically, I’ve to date got 90 songs published in three SongBooks, several chamber and orchestral pieces, piano works, a full-length Broadway-style musical called Penelope, choral works, and a large orchestral piece known as Sinfonia Matrix, which requires some 80-octillion years to be heard in its entirety. Therefore, per-formance versions are extracted depending upon available forces, duration required and occasion.
Available CDs include Mythos (piano pieces based upon Greek myth characters, recorded in recital and in-studio), Five Fantasy
Nocturnes for piano, Campfire—The Burning Psaltery (a phantasmagorical piece for an innocent 12-string psaltery), 7 Solo Songs from
‘Penelope,’ and several selections from the SongBooks recorded in studio and at home, by me and various performers.
Also available on CD is the electronically-based Ambient Music Series, which includes Ambient Counterpoint, Grand Starbells,
Monochrome Frescos, The Singing Moon, and Whisperings of Angels.

All items detailed above are published by DreamStreet Press and available on Amazon or through DreamStreetPress.com.