Suite Remembrance

An accidental encounter with local film composer Brian Wilbur Grundstrom led to tonight's world premiere of Suite Remembrance. I happened to be walking down his street with a local film maker when the tuxedo-clad Grundstrom emerged from a taxi after winning a Peer Award from the Television, Internet and Video Association of DC for his score to the short film Sadie's Waltz. What was intended to be a perfunctory introduction extended into a forty-five minute visit to Grundstrom's studio from which I left with scores in-hand. Suite Remembrance is the expansion of music originally composed but not used for the 2007 feature film 2 Minutes Later. Grundstrom arranged the music as a single-movement for a performance at the Kennedy Center and later wrote four additional movements to comprise the entire suite. Film composers write with the understanding that both dialogue and picture are also voices in the score. For me, as a performer, film music without these two elements is ultimately Impressionistic. While, according to Grundstrom, Seduction was originally penned to underscore a romantic and possibly illicit encounter, the creative musician and imaginative listener are free to divine any context of their choosing.

~Clarinetist Brian David Jones