Bruce Odland, composer and sound artist of international standing and founder of the Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado, died at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, on September 17. He was 74 years old.
Born in Milwaukee and raised in Janesville, Wisconsin, Bruce graduated from Northwestern University in 1974 in composition and conducting. In addition to his classical training, he explored the music he heard in rivers, machinery, and city streets.
In 1976, Bruce was a 24 year-old musical director/sound artist for the state’s Centennial Chatauqua tour, which brought an entourage of artists and performers to small towns in Colorado, conducting workshops and theatrical performances. The last stop on the tour was Rangely. Bruce was composing a site-specific musical piece using recordings of local ambient sounds in each town, and one night in Rangely he was walking on Main Street with his sound gear, when a big black pick-up truck pulled up beside him. “We’ve got some sounds for you,” they said, and he got in. They took him out of town and up and down some hills, before pulling up beside a huge empty water tank. There was one entrance, a 19-inch portal. Inside it was pitch dark. They told him to go in.
Once he was inside, they began hammering on the Tank with rocks and boards. Bruce was frightened, of course, but when they stopped hammering, he forgot his fear. He found himself in the midst of the most astonishingly resonant sound cloud he’d ever heard. Years later, music critic Alex Ross would describe it: “It’s not a cathedral-style resonance, which dissipates in space as it travels. Instead, sound seems to hang in the air, at once diffused and enriched. The combination of a parabolic floor, a high concave roof, and cylindrical walls elicits a dense mass of overtones from even a footfall or a cough.”
Even that night, Bruce brought his musician friends back to the Tank, where they had the first of many jam sessions in the resonant seven-story steel structure. They would return for decades.
In 2013, when the Tank was threatened to be sold for scrap, Bruce led an effort to rescue it, running two successful Kickstarter campaigns and securing the help of town officials and hundreds of supporters. The Tank was converted into an up-to-code performance space/assembly hall with a recording studio, and the organization formed to save it, The Friends of the Tank, formed a nonprofit and hired staff for what would become The Tank Center for Sonic Arts.
Under Bruce’s leadership, the Tank attained a national reputation, with an annual Solstice Festival, major concerts by Grammy-winning artists, dozens of recording sessions each year, a record label, and free Open Saturdays where anyone can come and sing, play, holler, or just listen.
Just listening was Bruce’s ideal in life. Speaking of people’s reaction to the Tank’s resonance, he said, “People feel a genuine awe. They may ascribe it to the Tank, but I ascribe it to the awakening of the ears in a predominantly visual age. Our ears get so abused on a daily basis. Our modern society makes a bad offer to them. We don’t use the hearing sense the way we evolved to, as hunter-gatherers interacting with nature. In there, you feel the sound on the skin, you feel it in your gut. What people are in awe of is their own ability to hear properly.”
The Tank was just one facet of Bruce’s career as a sound artist. He served as the first Director of Sound and Music for the Denver Center Theatre Company, led the Bruce Odland Big Band, and worked in independent film and theater with Peter Sellars, the Wooster Group, JoAnne Akalaitis, André Gregory and Wallace Shawn.
Bruce retired as chair of the Tank’s Board of Directors in July, 2026, assuming the title of Founder Emeritus.
He is survived by his wife, his three children and their spouses, and a grandchild. A private family service will be held in Michigan, and a memorial is planned at the Tank for spring. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Tank Center for Sonic Arts.
I deeply regret not having met Bruce before our recent recording in the Tank, to express my appreciation, admiration and gratitude for his bringing to life this amazing space and his dedication to listening awareness. Being in the Tank for 3 days earlier this month was a wonderful experience, and a wonderful continuation of over 50 years of discovering and honoring special sites of resonance, in Europe, the US, India and many other countries.