SELECTED PRESS

‘Most of this year’s planned tributes to Beethoven’s 250th birthday have been canceled due to the pandemic, so one welcomed the Sinfonietta’s contribution, which proved characteristically unorthodox. Rather than offer something wholly familiar, Chen led the Sinfonietta strings in Jeffrey L. Briggs' arrangement of two movements from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 13, ‘Pathetique.’ This may have seemed like a stunt, in that this music is so inherently pianistic. But there were new pleasures to be drawn from this arrangement. In the adagio cantabile second movement (mistakenly identified onscreen as the third movement), Chen conjured considerable tenderness and introspection. And in the last movement, the conductor took a slower tempo than pianists usually do, giving the music a degree of grandeur it rarely receives.’ - Chicago Sinfonietta review by HOWARD REICH for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, October 18,2020.

"Does the world need a string quartet transcription of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata?  Indeed, this transcription by Jeffery Briggs does what a transcription is supposed to do: adding new understanding to an existing work and expanding the base of musicians and audience-members who have access to the work." — Wayne Lee Gay, “For the Passion,” Theater Jones Performing Arts News - Fort Worth, Feb. 14, 2017.

"Briggs’ music is beautifully crafted, colorfully orchestrated and highly atmospheric. Broadly speaking, it sounds something like a 21st-century update of Debussy’s La Mer, with lots of oceanic effects such a continual rapid blur in the strings and big, glassy brass chords moving in and out." — Greg Stepanich, “Soloists, new work provide mega-meal at Miami Music Festival,”  Palm Beach ArtsPaper, July, 27, 2016.

"... the piece flowed beautifully. At times Briggs’ music evokes a Stravinsky-style modernism, at others the tense anxious mood of Bernard Hermann’s work scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense. Despite featuring two distinct poems, the piece has an overarching unity. It never sounds piecemeal or episodic. Briggs’ called up sounds of weather—thunder, rising wind, powerful storms, the emergence of the sun onto a scene still wet with rain—using nothing but the instruments of the orchestra. The elemental aspects of the music matched a similar tone in the poems. In the same way, both music and poem embody lightness and a sense of grace, no matter how potent the themes might be ... " — Chauncey Mabe, “When Words and Music Come Together,”   LitChat Blog, Sept. 26, 2016.

"Three weeks of ambitious orchestral programming by the Miami Music Festival concluded Saturday night at the New World Center in Miami Beach.  It opened with the world premiere of ‘Two Poems of Hyam Plutzik,’ a 14-minute work  ...Mostly minimalist and urgent in the first section, the piece turns lyrical in the second before reverting to its minimalist origins. The MMF orchestra effectively conveyed the changing  moods and textures with particularly nice playing by the strings in the first poem, ‘An equation,’ and by the winds, especially the solo clarinet, in the second poem, ‘Jim Desterland.’" — Dave Rosenbaum, “Young pianist’s fresh Rachmaninoff highlights ambitious concert at Miami Music Festival,” South Florida Classical Review, July 24. 2016.

"Brigg’s three-movement piece (4th Quartet) is attractive and subtly ambitious. It opened with set of hushed, rocking sonorities, swaying in counterpoint to the barge itself in the East River currents. There is a short violin line that reaches gracefully for the sky. The composing has the intriguing quality of being built out of tiny units that are parts of different eras in the string quartet literature, like two-beat classical rhythms, and groups of four sixteenth notes. The music doesn’t develop so much as explore its own antecedents. The short second movement is a Stephen Foster-esque country blues, the finale an intricate machine of offset, rhythmic, interlocking parts. The medium tempo was ideal, making it easy to hear how each bit of the machine worked together to build a substantial, weighty whole…" — George Grella, “Amernet "Quartet brings rich Old World flavor to New York return,”  New York Classical Review, Aug. 10, 2014.

“In Aurora for Piano, for four hands, Jeff Briggs… has written a nicely paced minimalistic miniature…”  — South Bend Tribune

“I must bow to the Civilization IV sound track. It is literally a piece of art...”  — SoftPedia

"(Civ IV’s) original score packs an emotional wallop." — LA Times

"I can't say enough about the excellent soundtrack." — Associated Press

"From the early bleeps and bloops of Pong… to the sophisticated compositions found in Civilization IV… the performers synchronized their music to projected video images." —Washington Post

"...the music really steals the show." — IGN

"Musically Civ IV stands out, with original pieces… rubbing shoulders with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven." — Silicon-Fusion.com

"...the soundtrack in Civilization IV is one of the most soothing, fulfilling and fitting I have heard in a video game yet." —ActionTrip

"Special mention must be made about the first thing you encounter in Civilization IV, its wonderful music. Right from the moment the menu screen loads up the player is treated to an array of evocative and wonderfully arranged melodies." — Ferrago (Italy)

“(CPU BACH) … is one of the most sophisticated pieces of pure artificial intelligence ever created, both technically and conceptually. What CPU Bach does is to compose pieces of Bach-style music, based on the parameters that you set. The music can be as detailed as the Brandenburg Concertos, or simple, clean, and sparse, depending on how many virtual instruments you choose to use. It's almost like having the ghost of Bach sitting in your living room, furtively cranking out all of the music he was unable to finish in his lifetime.”  — CIV FANATICS

“And Colonization music… I can listen to it without the game.” — Mirsoft.com

“Dr. Jeffery Briggs, MicroProse's ‘composer in residence,’ is the brain behind the music.” — Eskimo.com