| Contemporary music |
Rock Galaxy: Zack Browning turns numbers into music, and music into something genuinely alive
Most composers who talk about “structure” mean something the listener isn’t meant to notice, scaffolding that disappears once the piece is finished. Zack Browning’s structures work the opposite way. On Rock Galaxy, his remarkable release on Neuma Records, the hidden architecture behind every piece is exactly what gives the music its pulse, its drama, and, somehow, its warmth. Zack is a composer who has spent four decades building a genuinely personal system out of numerology, feng shui and planetary mysticism, and the result on this album is eight pieces that feel less like compositions and more like small, encoded stories waiting to be decoded by the ear.
Zack Browning has described his guiding philosophy in terms borrowed from his late colleague Herbert Brün: the idea that a composer should write music that “makes the composer necessary“. For Browning, that necessity comes from constraint rather than freedom. Since a pivotal decision in the mid-‘80s to stop dividing his time between classical trumpet and pop piano and instead fuse the two permanently, he’s built a compositional toolkit around planetary magic squares, the ancient number grids, first catalogued in Renaissance-era texts on occult philosophy, where every row, column and diagonal sums to the same total, layered against the Flying Star system of feng shui and its rotating Lo Shu square. Into those grids, he feeds birth dates, historic anniversaries and personal milestones, and lets the resulting numerical patterns dictate rhythm, pitch and orchestration.
It’s a genuinely unusual way to write music, and on paper it risks sounding like an academic exercise. In practice, on Rock Galaxy, it produces some of the most vivid, physically exciting music released this year, proof that Browning’s real gift isn’t the system itself, but his instinct for turning that system’s outputs into music with genuine emotional stakes.
What separates Rock Galaxy from a lot of concept-driven contemporary composition is how directly its abstract number-grid method connects to real, often deeply human material. “Mercury Music”, scored for solo percussion, is the clearest example: Browning builds the piece from Rosa Parks’s birth date intertwined with the founding date of the Confederate States, using the Mercury magic square as the connective structure between them. The result is a piece that manages to carry real historical weight, a meditation on American racial history rendered entirely through rhythm and resonance rather than a single spoken word.
“Fate and Fusion”, a duo for vibraphone and marimba, works a similar trick on a more intimate scale, built around a single shared date, April 15, that marks both the birth of Browning’s own daughter and the death of a collaborating percussionist’s father, with a set of variations on Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” woven through as an emotional anchor. It’s a genuinely moving structural conceit: two mallet instruments in constant, shifting dialogue, built from a date that means two completely different things to two different people, resolved through a jazz standard about fatherhood itself.
“Jupiter LVB” takes a lighter, more celebratory angle on the same method, using Beethoven’s name, birth date, zodiac sign and Fifth Symphony as raw material to mark the composer’s 250th birthday, and the result, scored for woodwind quintet, is genuinely playful, its animated lines never feeling like homework dressed up as homage.
Where the personal-history pieces ground the album, the more elemental and mystical works give it its widest scope. Opener “Sol Prophecy”, commissioned by the Portuguese quartet Nota do Meio, dramatizes the six dates of the Fátima Marian apparitions and the Miracle of the Sun through nothing but piano and two percussionists. No vocalist, no narration, and yet the piece carries an unmistakable narrative charge, its rotating magic-square structure mapping directly onto each of the six apparition dates. “Cosmic Changes”, for flute and harp, channels the Five Element Theory of feng shui (fire, water, wood, earth and metal) into a piece that manages to feel simultaneously airborne and rooted, its harp and flute lines trading the kind of fluttering, unresolved energy that theory’s five phases suggest.
The title track “Rock Galaxy” is the album’s most purely symphonic gesture, pairing marimbaist William Moersch with the Jupiter String Quartet in a piece built from the planetary squares of Mars, Venus and Jupiter, with fragments of Mozart’s own “Jupiter” Symphony folded in as a nod toward universal harmony. It’s cinematic in the best sense, not because it borrows film-score gestures, but because its structural logic genuinely earns its widescreen scale.
Not everything on Rock Galaxy needs quite so much explaining to land. “Upscale Jammer”, a solo piano showcase built from percussionist Jerry King Musser’s birth date, is pure kinetic energy, dense, pounding, and over before it wears out its welcome at under three minutes, functioning almost like a palate-cleanser between the album’s more expansive statements. And closer “Moon Venus” for percussion ensemble, might be the record’s most purely infectious piece: built from the ruling planets of its commissioner Jeremy Brunk and James Brown, and threading in transformed material from trumpeter Clifford Brown and reggae singer Dennis Brown, it’s a joyfully layered piece of structural wordplay that closes the album on a note of pure rhythmic exuberance rather than resolution.
Across all eight pieces, what’s most striking is how consistently Browning avoids the two obvious traps of concept-driven composition, dry academicism on one side, gimmickry on the other. The magic squares and feng shui frameworks are real, rigorous, and genuinely present in the finished music’s DNA, but nothing here ever feels like it’s asking you to do homework before you’re allowed to enjoy it. You can listen to Rock Galaxy with zero knowledge of Lo Shu squares or the Flying Star system and simply be carried along by its restless, cross-genre energy, the “speed-demon” propulsion that publications from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to The New York Times have been trying to pin down in Browning’s music for years.
It’s worth noting, too, just how much institutional weight sits behind this restless creative energy. Browning studied composition with Krzysztof Penderecki at Florida State before further study with Benjamin Johnston, Salvatore Martirano and Paul Zonn at the University of Illinois, where he later spent decades shaping younger composers as Associate Professor Emeritus and as director of the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, a program that, in 27 years, has reviewed 6,666 scores and distributed nearly $46,000 to emerging composers. That’s a career built on genuine mentorship as much as personal creative ambition, and Rock Galaxy feels like the work of someone still restlessly curious after four decades in the field, not someone coasting on reputation.
Rock Galaxy is a genuinely thrilling listen: eight pieces that use rigorous, deeply personal structural systems to produce music that’s alive, physical and unpredictable from start to finish. Neuma Records, already one of the most consistently adventurous labels in contemporary composition, has once again backed a record that rewards both casual listening and close study in equal measure. A genuinely great record!
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 13th, 2026
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Album on Neuma Records’ website
Tracklisting:
1.Sol Prophecy 10:35
2.Cosmic Changes 11:51
3.Mercury Music 09:39
4.Rock Galaxy 10:03
5.Upscale Jammer 02:43
6.Fate and Fusion 08:36
7.Jupiter LVB 09:02
8.Moon Venus 07:24
Total Time: 69:59
Tracklisting and musicians:
1.Sol Prophecy (2024)
Alice Vieira & Rúben Lopes, pianos
Francisco Ribeiro & Tiago Dias, percussion
2.Cosmic Changes (2022)
Elisa Moles, flute
Molly O’Roark, harp
3.Mercury Music (2021, rev. 2025)
Tiago Dias, percussion
4.Rock Galaxy (2023)
William Moersch, marimba
Jupiter String Quartet
5.Upscale Jammer (2017)
Ju-Ping Song, piano
6.Fate and Fusion (2017)
Francisco Ribeiro, vibraphone
Rui Camões, marimba
7.Jupiter LVB (2020)
Eastern Illinois University Faculty Woodwind Quintet
8.Moon Venus (2019)
Millikin University Percussion Ensemble
Jeremy Brunk, director