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The Current
With 'Jubilation,' Dupont composer strikes a chord

The Blade
Sounds of 'Jubilation' GWU Orchestra performs piece by gay composer as part of fall concert

By AMY CAVANAUGH
Friday, November 17, 2006

Gay composer Brian Wilbur Grundstrom discards traditional methods of composing music and instead embraces innovation and technology. I don t write with a key signature, says Grundstrom, who also composes on a computer, I need to do something challenging that holds attention.

This recipe for composition has succeeded, and Sunday, Nov. 19, marks the world premiere of Grundstrom s Jubilation! Dance for Orchestra. The piece is part of the George Washington University Orchestra s fall concert scheduled for 3 p.m. at Lisner Auditorium. The concert also includes Beethoven s Symphony Number 6 and Mozart s Die Zauberflöte overture.

When Grundstrom, 43, began composing Jubilation! he wanted something upbeat, easy to shop around and under 10 minutes long. In typical Grundstrom fashion, the piece is written in 5/4 time, a rhythm not frequently heard in standard music.

I use 5/4 and 5/8, he says. It keeps things interesting, accessible and melodically fairly complex, even though it s still simple. Nancia D Alimonte, the director and conductor of the George Washington University Symphony Orchestra, is conducting Grundstrom s work for the first time. She notes Grundstrom s use of meter in Jubilation.

It s not in straightforward 4/4 or common time, D Alimonte says. The music is accessible but there are an awful lot of challenging rhythms that the orchestra has been able to handle.

Grundstrom, who lists Chopin, Joplin and Shostakovich as influences, attended rehearsals for the GWU Orchestra s fall concert.

It was fun to watch them and watch the piece mature with them, he says, Normally with professional orchestras you have limited rehearsal time, but with the university orchestra, it s a course, so they re really dedicated and focused on it.

D Alimonte has also valued the shared time with the composer.

It s nice that he s there, because there have been questionable notes or a harmony that didn t line up, D Alimonte says, Since the score had never been played before, these kinds of things dohappen. He s there more as a resource. Since he s alive and well and kicking, you can ask him what he meant, unlike with deceased composers, where you sometimes wonder, what did Shostakovich want here?

GRUNDSTROM BEGAN COMPOSING in high school, and he earned his BA in music from Gettysburg College, before earning an MBA in arts administration from SUNY Binghamton. At Gettysburg he took several courses in composition and studied piano. Despite his experience with the piano, Grundstrom composes for other instruments as well and delves into various types of composition.

I had a brief venture on the baritone [horn] in high school, but I love all the instruments, and it s fun getting to know them and what they can do, he says. When you have an orchestra, it s probably easier to compose for since you can switch between instruments and provide variation. In October, the Trinity Chamber Orchestra of Washington premiered one of Grundstrom s pieces, Before the Fall, at St. Ann s Church in D.C. He also did a commission, How I Met Sam, for Colla Voce in San Francisco. Children s author James Skofield wrote the lyrics for the piece, and it was sung at the 2006 Out Games in Montreal.

It was performed in an 850-seat hall, where everyone [was] in a jovial mood, says Grundstrom. I had a hard time getting my friends in since every ticket was gobbled up. There s a live recording on my website, and the piece is very campy.

Grundstrom also sings, and was part of the New York City Gay Men s Chorus for eight years. Performing wonderful music as gay men, just being up there openly gay makes a statement, he says. The chorus was very important to me in New York and being in a room full of gay men that wasn t a bar was extraordinary.

ORIGINALLY FROM LEWISBURG, Penn., Grundstrom lived in New York City for 17 years where he worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He moved to D.C. two and one half years ago with his partner and now works doing database administration for the Washington National Opera. Washington has been a good place for me, he says. I ve made good connections with music and found opportunities for playing. When you move, you re able to re- prioritize everything, and I am really able to just focus on the music.

Focusing on the music has paid off. Last year Grundstrom received an artist fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and has been commissioned to do a piece for the New Jersey Gay Men s Chorus.

He also hopes to do more film music. He has composed music for three short films, including Machinations, a film by Tohubohu Productions and directed by William R. Coughlan, which will be screened on Friday, Nov. 17, at the Georgetown/Adams Morgan Film and Music Festival. Though it s difficult for instrumental works to be considered gay, Grundstrom notes that gay films and gay choruses often use the work of gay composers, musicians and lyricists. I think it s important to be out as a musician, Grundstrom says. It s gay works that come out and speak about our love and tell our stories in our context.

The Washington Post

Friday, July 10, 2009
'Pepe' at Home at Fringe Fest

It's two weeks before opening night, and the cast of the Capital Fringe Festival's "Pepe! The Mail Order Monkey Musical" is still making do without a finished set, costumes or props. Worse, Rick Hammerly, the Helen Hayes Award-winning actor who plays the titular primate, is out sick, having been replaced -- for the show-stopping number that includes the lament "What Am I Doing in This Box?" -- by musical director Brian Wilbur Grundstrom and -- for his poop-flinging escape from the aforementioned shipping container -- by co-choreographer Nora Lockshin.

Nevertheless, the music and vocal performances are almost shockingly polished, and not only for a Fringe show, which this most definitely is.

Based on the real-life experience of local glass artist Tim Tate -- who as a 9-year-old in the late 1960s sent $19.95 for a live squirrel monkey, only to have the animal wreak havoc on his mother's bridge club -- the musical by filmmaker Jon Gann, founder of the D.C. Film Alliance, is an at-times-funny, at-times-poignant meditation on freedom. It also has been given a somewhat happier ending than the actual story. The show may be all Gann's, as Tate is quick to point out, but that doesn't stop Tate from providing a quick promotional blurb. "It's 'Les Miz,' " he says, "with a monkey."

-- Michael O'Sullivan

Interview with Joel Markowitz
DC Theatre Scene

Brian: Pepe! is my first musical, but not my first time writing for voice, nor the orchestra, nor for theater. I have written several choral works, so the process of setting text to music was not new, but the traditional Broadway format requested by Jon was new. In writing concert choral works, I had more liberty to repeat and expand the text as required by the music. The Broadway format, however, I found to be much more rigid, and more about getting through the text. Not the lingering aria I wanted to write.

Joel: Talk about the process of writing the score.

Brian: Jon (Gann) may have requested a simple traditional Broadway format, but given my classical orchestral training and film work, there was no way that I was not going to have my [sophisticated if I may] voice work its way into the music. For example, rhythm was extremely important in “It’s Here”. Not written the standard 3/4 or 4/4, the compound meter (3+3+2+2/8) provided for that “extra” beat that made the song both sophisticated and catchy. This meter challenged the actors, but they rose to the occasion and the hard work paid off.

The structure, while limiting, however does provide a framework within which creativity can flourish. While Jon provided me with the structure – the A B and C parts, the text also required subtle variations, much like the flourishes on a Chopin Nocturne to provide interest while repeating the same material. Orchestration was also key to provide variation along with character development depending on who was singing the verse. For example, Chris got rock drums as part of his rebellious character. The father’s lines were simplified to be more in character.
Given this emphasis on a pre-defined format, writing Pepe required a lot of manipulation of the fundamentals of music – melody, harmony and rhythm. Unlike my orchestral compositions, the more impressionist elements of texture and dynamics took a secondary role, providing variation in repeats as opposed to defining structure.

I was actually surprised how much I used my knowledge of music theory to help me solve the problems at hand. In fact, it was considerably more than my recent concert premiere of “American Reflections for Strings and Harp”. In writing for orchestra, I orchestrate as I compose, and I have learned that I really can trust my ear to let me solve the issues at hand, and only analyze harmony as needed if a problem arises.

By contrast, writing for Pepe! started first with a piano score, and orchestrations were the last thing to be completed (and changed until the day before opening). During this process, parts of the musical had to be moved around and adapted to fit as necessary. Solving these issues required much more harmonic skill to get them to work appropriately. And add to that the obligatory “cheap modulation” to provide forward motion, as well the accommodation of the singers’ vocal ranges. Finesse and sophistication of music theory is required to make these modulations work properly and not sound tacky.

Another example of the deliberate use of harmony is in “He’s Gone”, where I employed a deceptive cadence to create interest. (A deceptive cadence means resolving to sixth rather than the tonic. In C major, that would meaning resolving to an A minor chord rather than a C major chord. It is called deceptive because two the notes in the chords are the same – C and E. The G however is replaced by and A.)

Lastly, interaction with the singers helped shape the work. When Rick Hammerly came over to record his solo for the cast recording, we made some refinements. Without a conductor, it was important to build in musical cues so that the actors know when to come in. For Rick, this meant adding in a few bells at the start of phrases following a held note.

Composer Roundtable Discussion

With Christopher M. Wright and Gregg Martin