i sit in my room ..., a 12-song collection pulled from four decades of performance work with wife and life long coconspirator Linda Mussmann, arrives September 19—right as the couple works to secure TSL's future beyond them both.
Claudia Bruce has been singing most of the songs on her new album for decades. On September 19, for the first time, anyone else can hear them too. i sit in my room ..., her debut album, streams and downloads via Bandcamp starting that day, with physical CDs expected around the same time, and Time & Space Limited, which she’s run with wife Linda Mussmann for over 50 years, in Hudson is throwing a release party at 3:30pm.
The 12 tracks span 1984 to 2024. "Linda and I, of course, are theater people," Bruce says. "Linda writes the text and directs, and I perform in them, and while we're doing that text, I write tunes that go with the words." What ended up on the album, in other words, are songs pulled out of TSL's own performance history: simple, self-accompanied on piano or ukulele, built to live inside the context of a piece of theater, but captivating on their own. Bruce has a lovely, gentle voice that many have commented sounds surprisingly young.
The push to record them at all came from Kim Barkey, a friend and TSL collaborator who's also been helping steer the organization's succession planning. People had been telling Bruce for years that they wished her songs existed somewhere they could hear them again.
Bruce only needed one day in the studio. "Out of all the songs I've written so far—which are written down—I picked out 12," Bruce says. "I made sure that I could play them, because sometimes I play with other people... but I wanted to do it myself." She went in prepared enough to cut the whole record quickly.
Most of the songs carry specific memories for her, tied to the performances they came from. "Every time I play one, I'm like, ‘Oh, I really like this,’" she says. "It's like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that performance. That was great.’" The one exception on the record is "The '99' Song," which closes the album: It’s the only song with lyrics written by Bruce, during the days of Occupy Wall Street.
Bruce is characteristically modest about the whole undertaking. She calls it simply one of the things that happens as an artist keeps working. "It's been an experience," she says. "It's been a nice change to go out and do stuff like that."
The album lands in the middle of a bigger undertaking at TSL: figuring out what happens to the organization once its founders are no longer running it. “We’re not retiring. But we won’t be here forever. I’m 80. Linda is 79,” says Bruce.
Mussmann started Time & Space Limited in New York City in 1973; Bruce joined as co-director in 1976. In 1991, the two refused a National Endowment for the Arts grant that came with an anti-obscenity pledge attached, a decision that, combined with rising New York City costs, pushed them to relocate to a former bread factory on Columbia Street in Hudson, where TSL has operated ever since.
Bruce and Mussmann have spent much of this year formalizing what they call the Legacy Project. "We've talked about this for a while: What's going to happen to TSL after us?" Bruce says. "Is it going to go on, or is it going to be like Cunningham?"—a reference to choreographer Merce Cunningham, whose company danced out its existing repertory and then dissolved, leaving the technique to be taught by individual practitioners rather than carried forward as an institution. TSL's founders chose the first path: building a structure meant to let the organization continue.
That decision led to the recently launched Mussmann/Bruce Foundation and the TSL Legacy Fund, a permanent endowment with an initial goal of $75,000 in founding gifts by November 15. The foundation is explicitly built around what TSL calls the “Mussmann/Bruce Method,” describing the archive of the pair's work not as a closed historical record but as "a living resource" meant to keep provoking new artists. A parallel online archive, at Archive.timeandspace.org, is already collecting decades of the pair’s material.
Getting there took real work. Barkey led Bruce and Mussmann through roughly six weeks of structured sessions last November and December, an hour and a half each week, working through what the organization's guiding principles should be once its founders pass. "You have to set up guidelines," Bruce says. "But it’s really hard because how do you set up a guideline for TSL that we've just been juggling for 50 years?" The planning phase has turned into active organizing, with Barkey and integral TSL administrator Jeremy Bullis now helping shape the foundation day to day. Bruce describes the current TSL staff, with evident pride, as spanning decades in age themselves—people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, preserving an institution built well before most of them were born.
Talking about her own place in that plan isn't especially comfortable for Bruce. "It's kind of bizarre," she says, of discussing her own legacy directly. "I'm not really good about talking about myself." Retirement, in any case, doesn't seem to be on the table. "We'll never retire," she says. "How can I retire? Who wants to retire?"
For now, i sit in my room ... stands as a small, concrete piece of that larger project: proof, on a CD, that the songs Bruce has been singing in TSL's performances for 40 years exist as powerful, sweetly sung artifacts.
Album Release Party: Saturday, September 19, 3:30pm, Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY
