A composer comes home

Gregory Brown ’93 turns to a visitor after hearing his vocal piece “Te Deum” rehearsed by The Skylark Vocal Ensemble on a day in late January. “You hear that it’s not happy music,” he says. Wearing worn blue jeans and a gray sweater, he sits on a couch in the Forrestal-Bowld Music Center’s library, a space where his mother, Connie Brown, then the Music Department secretary, used to work. “A giant tuba sat on that ledge or near here somewhere,” Brown says, gesturing, as his face displays a mix of joy and incredulity. “I used to blow it and it made a horrible, huge noise. That was something I was allowed to do when I was 3 or 4 years old.”

As music faculty enter the library seeking scores and CDs, each teacher banters with Brown, who is widely recognized; he grew up on campus, the son of revered Exeter Math Instructor Richard “Dick” Brown. Between greetings, the composer describes the genesis of “Te Deum” and its companion piece, “Sepulchrum Mutum” (Silent Tomb). Both are scheduled to premiere that night in The Bowld, Exeter’s state-of-the-art music performance space, and to be performed the following day as a meditation in Phillips Church.

The genesis for “Te Deum” reaches back to Brown’s childhood — at about the tuba-blasting age — when he accompanied his family to a christening in Phillips Church. “That is one of my first memories, being there,” says the composer, who remembers looking up at the colorful stained glass, which incorporates excerpts from the traditional “Te Deum” hymn of praise, and discovering in the window’s design both power and mystery. Several decades later, he found himself looking at that stained glass again during the memorial service for a close friend, the boy whose christening he had attended years earlier.

Soon after, searching for a way to respond to this unexpected death, Brown attempted a score, using the words of the “Te Deum” from the Phillips Church window. Although the text is typically “a very joyous, reverent act of faith to proclaim,” Brown says, “for me, for a variety of reasons, it was not that. My associations with it were not of joy, not of faith.” The music, instead, expressed “a certain anger and confusion.”

“I hated it. I put it in the drawer,” Brown says of his first try. Three years later, he opened the drawer and made some major changes: “I removed things. I added things. It made more sense.” Still, he wasn’t happy. “The material didn’t support the structure,” Brown now sees. “I was trying to build a skyscraper out of mud. I had to go back and rethink what the shape of the building was.”

Years later, he picked it up again, this time with success.
 

Why are the angels crying?

“There’s something very visceral, very elemental about people coming together to sing,” says Brown, who composes instrumental and vocal music and is interim director of choral activities at Amherst College. He sees power and value not only in trained choral performances, but also in the combined voices at an English soccer match. (“It’s rowdy and raucous and it’s 20,000 to 30,000 people singing.”)

“What’s great about vocal music is that the music and the text can sometimes be working together and sometimes working against each other, and the tensions create something that is new,” Brown says. 

In “Te Deum,” he builds on some of his childhood interpretations of the hymn’s meaning. “The line breaks in the window are unusual because they have to fit into a circle,” he says, referencing the stained glass design. “‘To | thee all | angels cry,’ for example. As a kid, I misunderstood it. Why are the angels crying? Why are they sad? That’s something that I work to illustrate in this music, something idiosyncratic not only to me but to this window.”