His compositions include works for chamber and choral ensembles, as well as several chamber operas, and have received awards from BMI, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, Harvard University, and other organizations. Noted ensembles which have performed and/or commissioned his music include Speculum Musicae, 20th Century Unlimited, the Empyrean Ensemble, the Rire-Woodbury Dance Company, the Harvard Glee Club, and the HBO series “The Sopranos.” Brian has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composer’s Conference, served as Composer-in-Residence for Intermezzo: the New England Chamber Opera Series, and was a Visiting Composer at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus.

As a theorist Brian has published in Perspectives of New Music and has given papers at several scholarly venues, including “Repetition Theory” at Indiana University, “Virtuosity in Rhythm and Rhyme: The Art of Ice Cube” at the 2006 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southeast-Caribbean Chapter, “On the Virtual Environment of Music” at the University of Kansas, and “Improvisation as an Analytic Category” at a conference on improvisation at the Prince Klaus Conservatory in the Netherlands. He recently presented a paper entitled “Repetition as Difference: Overturning the ‘Minimal’ in Minimalism” at the First International Conference on Minimalism at the University of Wales (UK). His theoretic interests include repetition, temporality, and the writings of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, as well as Eastern philosophy.