Adrian Dunn Brings Gospel Music to the Bradley Symphony Center
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2024.25 Season, Chorus
Adrian Dunn’s genre-bending music is a natural fit for the Bradley Symphony Center and for audiences that may not have visited it before.
Dunn, a Chicago-based composer, conductor, and singer, will lead Adrian Dunn’s Wonderful: A Soulful Celebration at the home of the Milwaukee Symphony on Dec. 7. The show includes a gospel band, his 12-voice professional group The Adrian Dunn Singers, and a larger choir of singers from Chicago and Milwaukee, including the local group Praise Motivated, led by Anthony McGahee.
“Black, brown, white, we want to connect with people,” Dunn said in a recent phone interview. The program features his original music, which he called “gospel, jazz, hip-hop, with a classical spine.”
It might also be a description of his own career. He grew up training as a classical singer, but also with “a sense of Blackness and who I was.” His mother, a touring musician, “gave me a global perspective on music and music education. I learned that music is music – music is the Holy Spirit – regardless of genre.”
While he was an undergraduate at Roosevelt University in Chicago (and singing in a choir led by Milwaukee Symphony Chorus Director Cheryl Frazes Hill), he began to write Hopera: A Hip-Hop Opera, in memory of friends he had lost to gun violence. “It changed my life because I had never thought of myself as a composer,” he said. But he received a Macarthur Foundation “genius grant” and found himself going to college classes and writing an opera at the same time.
Although Dunn’s compositions draw on many genres, he is writing with classically trained voices in mind. When his group is doing gospel or R&B, “vocal production is the same,” he said, “but how you execute is different with a microphone.”
Hopera, along with a new opera about Jackie Robinson that Dunn is currently working on, mix their genres freely, and Dunn thinks they might not fit in a traditional operatic venue. But he is used to that in his own career, which still includes work as a classical vocalist and choral director.
“Wonderful” includes some nods to the holiday season, including several loose quotes from Handel’s Messiah. In the current unsettled state of the world, “I hope ‘Wonderful’ is a break from all of that,” Dunn said. “We need the power of music. Any time you sing or you play, the atmosphere changes.”
Although the core of the “Wonderful” program remains the same, almost every performance sees some addition or subtraction. “I was still making changes yesterday,” Dunn said. But one consideration for programming the Milwaukee performance is the planned filming by Milwaukee PBS for a future broadcast.
And having visited the Bradley Symphony Center, Dunn has decided to do one number a cappella for the first time ever. “The acoustics are beautiful, and the singers are world-class, and they’ll sound incredible in there,” he said. “But it’s not a classical acoustic show. We want people to stand up and clap.”
