Pete Drungle

Pete Drungle is an American pianist, composer, music producer and multi-instrumentalist who has made music with Ornette Coleman, The Kronos Quartet, Yoko Ono, Ronald Shannon Jackson Decoding Society, Brice Wassy, Jef Lee Johnson, Al MacDowell, Craig Harris, Sean Lennon and many others.
Piano works
As a pianist, Drungle is an intrepid, adventurous improviser - possibly best exemplified by his legendary ; Wire magazine's Alan Licht remarked, "...In as much as free improvisation can be a real-time, stream of consciousness expression, Drungle's epic event pushed it well beyond the limits usually imposed by the customary concert timetable...That he was still functioning at a high level of creativity after 23 hours of continuous playing pays new testimony to the improvisational mindset. Drungle contributed the truest experiment in concert as performance art that PERFORMA had to offer."
In 2012, Pete collaborated with Rudolf Stingel on the creation of PETE DRUNGLE SOLO PIANO, with a limited edition printed on vinyl. The album was recorded in the "spray room" of Stingel's NYC studio over the course of 5 days ; approx 40 hours of improvised material was recorded, and Drungle distilled it down to 60 minutes for the album. The improvisations are in a somewhat "neo-Baroque" style, but illustrate Drungle's tendency toward Metamodernism; PETE Pete Drungle solo piano is the culmination of many years of exploration; with one foot in the past and one in the future, Drungle strives to make music that is authentic to his life experience rather than to imitate the music of others.
Pete is currently exhibiting multi-media performance pieces centered around the piano. Recently, he has been performing DREAM SEQUENCES FOR SOLO PIANO - a 60-minute solo piano improvisation accompanied by a video montage of 'dream sequences' extracted from the films of Luis Buñuel. DREAM SEQUENCES FOR SOLO PIANO was premiered at club Silencio (FR), and has since been performed in New York, Copenhagen, Paris () and Barcelona. Pete has accompanied several silent films, including Nosferatu (1922), Un chien andalou (1929), Themroc (1973), and notably has performed live, improvised solo piano scores for THE POLYEXPRESSIVE SYMPHONY - ITALIAN FUTURISM ON FILM (2009) presented by Performa09 at Anthology Film Archives, NYC; the event took place over the course of 4 evenings, and Drungle accompanied the American premieres of the silent Italian Futurist films THAIS (1917), SPEED (1930), STRAMLIANO (1929), MARCH OF THE MACHINES (1929), THE BELLY OF THE CITY (1932), and THE MECHANICAL MAN (1921).
Composed works
Pete has composed music for film, video, theater, television, fashion, dance and has collaborated with several visual and performance artists including Urs Fischer, Rudolf Stingel, Jeff Koons, Marianne Vitale, Alterazioni Video, Agathe Snow and others. His musical performances and compositions have accompanied art exhibitions and festivals world-wide at Art-Basel (Ch), the Whitney Biennial (NYC), , The Swiss Institute, TransArt (IT), MoMA, MoCA, The New Museum (NY), The Wundergrund Festival (DK), Deitch Gallery and Art Parade (NYC), Le Confort Moderne (FR), Performa 07, 09, 11 and 13, The United Nations (NYC) and others.
Drungle has created 10 full-length scores for dance, and has collaborated with choreographers Sarah Michelson, Susan Vencl, Wally Cardona, Lilibeth Cuenca-Rasmussen, Michael Portnoy, Candoco Dance Company (UK) and others ; his works for dance have been presented at The Royal Danish Theatre (DK), The Park Avenue Armory (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Walker Arts Center (MN), Chapter Arts (Cardiff, Wales), Merce Cunningham (NYC), River to River Festival (NYC), Abrams Art Center (NYC), and have toured the UK and the USA. Pete was given a Bessie Award for Best Composer, for his work on Michael Portnoy's The "K" Sound in 2006.

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