Bruce Reiprich's music has been described as "post-romantic radiance" (Danbury News-Times), "a deeply personal mediation on the poet's feelings" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "very powerful" (All Music Guide), "lovely and evocative" (Guitar Review-New York), "very impressive" (Cumhuriyet-Turkey), and "of special interest" (Guitar International-England). With compositions that span the gamut from overt tonality and metric regularity to atonality and pronounced rhythmic flexibility, he explores the beauty of lyrical lines, lush harmonies and colorful textures. Composers as diverse as Toru Takemitsu, György Ligeti, Luigi Nono and Samuel Barber have been particularly influential in the development of his own style.
Much of Reiprich's music is a reflection upon images of nature found in the Turkish poetry of Oguz Tansel and in classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. Recently, he has been influenced by the long sentences with spiraling subordinate clauses that Marcel Proust employed in his Remembrance of Things Past. Ultimately, it is the serene and contemplative–the unexpected moment of self-contained and quiescent beauty in nature and art–that serve as Reiprich's inspiration.
Bruce Reiprich has received grants from Meet the Composer and the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center, and a fellowship from the Charles Ives Center for American Music. In 2005, he was awarded a water-topic grant from Northern Arizona University for the composition of The River Empties Into . . . for soprano and orchestra. In 2006, Northern Arizona University awarded him an intramural grant for the composition and CD recording of I lingered beside the hawthorns for flute, viola and harp. He was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during the autumn of 2007.
His music has been heard abroad with performances in China, Germany, England, Turkey, and Mexico, and throughout the United States in major cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Paul, Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco, and in numerous radio broadcasts. International, national, and regional festival performances include the Shenyang Conservatory Festival of American Music (China), the International Contemporary Music Festival in Mexico City, the Society of Composers National and Regional Conferences, the Cambridge (England) Summer Recitals, the Chiron New Music Festival (New York), the Eleventh Annual New Music and Art Festival at Bowling Green State University, the Dorflinger Wildflower Festival (Pennsylvania), the University of Delaware Contemporary Music Festival, the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium (New Mexico), the Heidelberg College New Music Festival (Ohio), the Chaparral MusicFest (Arizona), the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival, the New Directions Concerts (California), and the University of Nebraska at Kearney New Music Festival VIII.
His chamber music has been performed by members and former members of the Turkish State Opera, the Ankara State Opera, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Halle, the San Francisco Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Augusta Symphony, and the Bakersfield Symphony. His music has been performed by Composers, Inc., Ensemble Talea, The Boston New Music Initiative, the Strung Out Trio, Chamber Mix, the Society for New Music, the Civic Performers Innovative Music, the Soundings Percussion Duo, the Caulkins Duo, the Larson-Taylor-Allvin Trio, the Kithara Guitar Trio, the DaPonte String Quartet, the Lyric Consort, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, the Ives Chamber Orchestra, the Bowling Green Philharmonia, the Singers' Guild of Scranton, the Wyoming Valley Oratorio Society, and the Performing Arts Institute Symphony Orchestra.