17 Facts About Bruce Haack

Bruce Clinton Haack was a Canadian musician and composer in the field of electronic music.

Bruce Haack played on his family's piano at the age of three, and was providing piano lessons for others by the time he was a teenager.

Bruce Haack is remembered at this time in his development as having a surprising ability to hear music and play it back immediately from memory, and would often compose innovative riffs through improvisation.

Bruce Haack was invited by Aboriginal peoples in Canada to participate in their pow-wows, experimenting with peyote, which influenced his music for years to come.

Bruce Haack's upbringing in the isolated town of Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, Canada, gave him plenty of time to develop his musical talents.

Bruce Haack received a degree in psychology from the university; this influence was felt later in songs that dealt with body language and the computer-like ways children absorb information.

At Juilliard, Bruce Haack met a like-minded student, Ted "Praxiteles" Pandel, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship.

Bruce Haack spent the rest of the 1950s scoring dance and theater productions, as well as writing pop songs for record labels like Dot Records and Coral Records.

Meanwhile, Bruce Haack wrote serious compositions as well, such as 1962's "Mass for Solo Piano", which Pandel performed at Carnegie Hall, and a song for Rocky Mountain House's 50th anniversary.

Bruce Haack found another outlet for his creativity as an accompanist for children's dance teacher Esther Nelson.

The otherworldly quality of Bruce Haack's music was emphasized by the instruments and recording techniques he developed with the Dance, Sing, and Listen series.

Bruce Haack continued to promote electronic music on television, demonstrating his homemade device encased in a suitcase on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1968, where he sampled a song by the Rolling Stones entitled "Citadel".

Bruce Haack released The Way-Out Record for Children later that year.

Bruce Haack continued making children's albums as well, including 1972's Dance to the Music, 1974's Captain Entropy, and 1975's This Old Man, which featured science fiction versions of nursery rhymes and traditional songs.

Bruce Haack's failing health slowed Dimension 5's musical output in the early 1980s, but Nelson and Pandel kept the label alive by publishing songbooks, like Fun to Sing and The World's Best Funny Songs, and re-released selected older albums as cassettes which are still available today.

In 1982, Bruce Haack recorded his swan song, a proto hip-hop collaboration with Def Jam's Russell Simmons, entitled "Party Machine".

Bruce Haack died in 1988 from heart failure, but his label and commitment to making creative children's music survives.