Andrew Bruck

At five years of age (in 1966), Andrew (“Andy”) Bruck attended a Symphony concert in Rock Island, Illinois featuring concert violinist Edith Peinemann. He immediately wanted to learn to play violin, so his parents facilitated private lessons when he turned six.  Committing to a music career, he obtained his Bachelor of Music degree from Indiana University in 1983 and his Master of Music degree at the Yale School of Music in 1985. While at Yale, he met and later married Cynthia Kempf, who was also enrolled en route to her Masters in Viola Performance.

Mr. Bruck and Ms. Kempf performed together in the Westbrook String Quartet for over 20 years, receiving intensive training with the Tokyo, Manhattan, Juilliard and Vermeer string quartets, and held faculty residencies at Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas and Youngstown State University, Ohio. During that time, they competed nationally and internationally, winning the Barbara Shields Byrum Bronze Medal at the 1990 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. They held a summer faculty residency for 14 years at the Bay View Music Festival in northern Michigan from 1993-2007.

After their Quartet Residency in Ohio ended, Mr. Bruck won the position in the Jacksonville Symphony in 1993 and Ms. Kempf subsequently won the seat in the viola section.

While in Jacksonville, he has been active as a classroom music teacher. From 2001-2011, he served as a volunteer violin instructor at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and for several years starting in 2009 taught in the Jacksonville Symphony Youth Orchestras Jump Start Strings Initiative at Woodland Acres Elementary School. In 2011, he began teaching violin at the daycare level, ages four to five, in coordination with local entrepreneur Richard Cuff’s Guiding Success program. In 2015, he began teaching a general music class at a second daycare at the Deerwood Academy and in 2016 taught a third daycare program at Torah Academy. Following a hiatus because of the pandemic, he recently started working with a new violin class at Minds of the Future Academy.

In the community realm, he belongs to the Buddhist organization SGI-USA, serves as President of the Musicians’ Association of Jacksonville and has been involved in the United Nations Association-USA for many years.