Jonathon Grasse is an American composer, ethnomusicologist, and improvising electric guitarist. He is a professor of music at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Career
Composition
Grasse’s list of music compositions dating to the late-1980s includes over thirty pieces for soloists, chamber groups, large ensembles, and American gamelan. His Triptych for String Trio was awarded first place in the 2012 American Composers Forum-Los Angeles competition. "The Informal Sector," a concerto for two trombones and Just Intonation gamelan (2010) premiered at a Microfest concert at Claremont's Harvey Mudd College. Both of these works appear on his 2016 CD Six Compositions. Many of his works for guitar and guitar ensemble have been concertized by Los Angeles-based guitarist Peter Yates. Since 2017, Grasse has collaborated with the new music ensemble Brightwork, resulting in two works for that sextet.
In addition to fully notated compositions, Grasse has collaborated with Los Angeles-based ensembles on structured improvisations and site-specific pieces as a composer and electric guitarist since the late 1990s. Grasse's four-hour-long piece "13 + 7 + one" (2006) for multiple ensembles was commissioned for the environs of the Frank Gehry-designed Edgemar complex in Santa Monica, California, where it was performed in 2006. The same year, his site-specific work "Curfew" for octet, covering four city blocks of the Long Beach Arts District, was performed for that city's Soundwalk festival. In 2003, the Los Angeles Times' critic Victoria Looseleaf reviewed his Skirball Cultural Center Siteworks electronic music collaboration with choreographer Parijat Desai: "Making felicitous use of the Mark Taper Courtyard in the site-specific series, choreographer Parijat Desai, in collaboration with Liam Clancy, Iddrisu Saaka and Denise Uyehara, performed “Water, Tree, Stone,” an elegiac take on the notion of peace. Set to Jonathon Grasse’s sound collage that veered from techno to Portuguese love songs and talk of cruise missiles, the quartet traversed the patio with butoh-like deliberateness before brandishing a large papier-mache globe among them."
Guitarist
As an electric guitarist, Grasse began experimenting with spontaneous improvisation with writer and pianist Carter Scholz, whom he met in 1986 as a member of the Mills College gamelan. Some of their Berkeley session recordings appear as part of Scholz' Frog Peak catalog. After relocating to Los Angeles, Grasse played guitar with Surrealestate and Decisive Instant, Los Angeles-based improvisation collectives. Between 1999 and 2012, he appeared on five full-length recordings of improvised ensemble music released through Acoustic Levitation Records, including his own Phantomwise (2012), and others featuring the Los Angeles-based collective Surrealestate, Gustavo Aguilar, and Robert Reigle. In this capacity he has appeared with various groups at the Hammer Museum, REDCAT Theater, the Electric Lodge in Venice, Eagle Rock Performing Arts Center's Open Gate Theater, Cultural Center of Long Beach, San Francisco's Luggage Store Gallery, and the 1999, and 2004 Big Sur Experimental Music Festival.
Academic
An M.A. in composition (UC Santa Cruz, 1995). In 1999, he earned a Ph.D. in composition with the cognate in ethnomusicology from UCLA. Grasse furthered his gamelan studies and performance in UCLA's Central Javanese gamelan directed by master Balinese musician and dancer Pak Nyoman Wenten. Remaining at UCLA as an instructor from 1999-2005, Grasse taught world music theory, music of Brazil, composition, and western music theory, and sponsored a student capoeira group. Along with ethnomusicologists Brenda Romero and Paul Humphries, Grasse was a principle presenter for the College Music Society-affiliated Institute for the Pedagogy of World Music Theories held at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2005, 2007, 2010), an institute that grew from their presentations at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Since 2005, he has been a professor of music at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where he directs the CSUDH Festival of New and Improvised Music.