#5041, With Composer Jeffrey Brooks: The Memory Palace

For this edition of New Sounds, Minneapolis-based American composer Jeffrey Brooks presents works from his 2025 album The Memory Palace and talks with host John Schaefer about how those with traumatic brain injury or who have suffered a stroke may experience time differently. Susan McClary, in her liner notes for The Memory Palace, further explains the guiding principles of Brooks's music: time remembered, time endured, and time anticipated. Schaefer writes:

Composer Jeffrey Brooks has just released his new album, The Memory Palace, and it is a remarkable document for several reasons. First, there is the striking, floating sound of the music – unmoored from rhythm for long stretches, and when rhythm does enter, the music seems unperturbed by its arrival. This from a composer whose earlier compositions were fiercely pulsing works that incorporated electric guitars and drum sets alongside more conventional classical instruments. Then there’s the fact that Jeffrey Brooks is still making music at all. “Okay it’s not exactly the cover of Rolling Stone,” he wrote in a recent email, but “I'm on the cover of Stroke/Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Magazine.” Brooks has had at least four strokes (doctors aren’t sure about the exact nature of the last one), which have left him unable to use his right hand, with a weakened left hand and vision that couldn’t really follow text on a page. But Brooks has found other ways to write music – and other ways to play it. 

The central sound of the title track of The Memory Palace is the instrument he calls the Stein-o-caster, a grand piano with electric guitar pickups which is played by continually brushing the strings inside the instrument with paintbrushes. Placing weights on the keys changes the sound (and allows a musician with very limited mobility a way to still “play”). The resulting sound is eerie, almost like an echo of a sound that you didn’t initially hear. And because of the pickups, that sound can be sustained over time, something a piano can’t do.


In addition to the Stein-o-caster, "The Memory Palace" sports contributions from several of the redoubtable Bang On A Can All-Stars (Brooks has been a longtime associate of the Bang On A Can new music organization), and as it progresses, it seems to say something about the fragility, and ultimately perhaps, the unreliability, of memory. (-John Schaefer)

Program #5041, With Composer Jeffrey Brooks: Memory Palace (First aired 8/27/25)

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars, Contemporaneous, David Bloom, Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother [1:00]
RECORDING: Brooks: The Passion
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music / Innova Music
INFO: https://cantaloupemusic.com/albums/passion | https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-passion

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: Time Garden [1:02]
RECORDING: The Memory Palace
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music 
INFO: https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-memory-palace

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: Time Garden [2:54]
RECORDING: The Memory Palace
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music 
INFO: https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-memory-palace

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: Time Garden [2:50]
RECORDING: The Memory Palace
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music 
INFO: https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-memory-palace

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: Time Garden [2:47]
RECORDING: The Memory Palace
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music 
INFO: https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-memory-palace

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: The Memory Palace [18:15]
RECORDING: The Memory Palace
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music 
INFO: https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-memory-palace

ARTIST: Bang on a Can All-Stars, Contemporaneous, David Bloom, Jeffrey Brooks
WORK: Brooks: After the Treewatcher [3:57]
RECORDING: Brooks: The Passion
SOURCE: Cantaloupe Music / Innova Music
INFO: https://cantaloupemusic.com/albums/passion | https://jeffreybrooks.bandcamp.com/album/the-passion