Jeremy Grimshaw Shares His Personal Journey with Grief and Music in His Faith + Works Lecture
Jeremy Grimshaw is a self-proclaimed “lapsed percussionist, aspiring humorist, pretend acoustician, wannabe visual artist, occasional trail runner, semi-satirical motivational speaker and a hapless gardener.” However, to others, Jeremy Grimshaw is known for being a phenomenal teacher, scholar, administrator and much more.
Grimshaw served as associate dean in the College of Fine Arts and Communications from 2015 to 2025 and played an instrumental part in the planning and construction of the new Brigham Young University Music Building. He is also the author of two books — one published by the Center for Latter-Day Saint Arts and the other by the University of Oxford Press. One of Grimshaw’s research and teaching interests is Balinese music, specifically Balinese Gamelan.
Watch the video below to see Jeremy Grimshaw play a reyong demo with his children.
Grimshaw is drawn to the Balinese Hindu idea of blurring the line between creativity and devotion. In 2017, he was in Bali visiting BYU music alum Gavin Ryan, who was a Fulbright researcher in Bali. He took Grimshaw to a special ceremonial performance of a dance and music drama called “Calonarang.”
“The crux of this story is an epic battle between Rangda, who is a destructive sorceress, and Barong, who is a benevolent spirit embodied as a beautiful white lion,” Grimshaw explained.
When a group of men stab the immortal Rangda, she becomes angry and casts a spell that causes the men to turn their swords on themselves. Instead of simply saving the men, Barong casts a spell that makes the men’s skin impenetrable. “The battle between these two epic cosmic forces — the embodiments of good and evil or creation and destruction — plays out at the tip of the sword as it is pressing into the skin, right over the men's hearts,” said Grimshaw.
Grimshaw compares the Balinese storytelling to the story of Enoch in the Pearl of Great Price.“This relentless struggle between opposing forces is kind of a spiritual and theological obsession of mine,” said Grimshaw. “I'm fascinated by Enoch's vision where God raises up the holy city of Enoch, and he shows Enoch the best and the worst of all creation and all of humanity throughout history. And the enormity of this cosmic conflict just breaks Enoch's heart, and by breaking his heart, it increases his capacity for love.”
Throughout his lecture, Grimshaw shared personal experiences with grief that would go on to shape his perception of sorrow, music and faith — experiences where, just as Enoch, his broken heart would increase his capacity for love. One experience he shared was about the passing of one of his music teachers growing up. “Her death and participating in the play “Our Town” in the same year is part of why my feelings associated with grief are forever entangled with the arts,” said Grimshaw. “By the time that I started to think of myself as a musician or an artist, I had learned that life could have pretty dramatic ups and downs, and that those ups and downs made me feel big, complex feelings, and those feelings were mixed together with my emerging faith and musicianship.”
In the months between his father’s head injury in the summer of 2013 and death in 2014, Grimshaw was forced to confront the entanglement between grief and music once again. “I spent a lot of time driving from my home in Payson to St. George to help my mom,” said Grimshaw. “The CD player in my crappy old Saturn was broken, and there were long stretches of radio silence on that part of I-15. Each trip meant long hours of driving in the dark alone with my thoughts. So to fill the darkness, I began crafting lyrics to a kind of folksy lament in a style that I thought my father would have appreciated.”
Below is a video of Grimshaw playing the song he began to craft on those long drives.
Grimshaw also spoke on a loss that many in the College of Fine Arts and Communications have had to grapple with. “Recently, I got some more terrible news: another dear friend and our former dean, Ed Adams, had passed away suddenly and far too early. I had come to love and admire him so much during the 10 years that we worked side by side, and because I do not know how to cry, I just spent the whole day in bed when I got the news, numb and angry at the universe. Then I got up and I sat down at the piano, and I flipped open the hymn book to page 97, and that day, and pretty much every day since then, I have played that hymn.”
Listen to Jeremy Grimshaw play the hymn in the video below.
Grimshaw shared his profound connection to hymn 97 — a connection rooted in all his experiences, such as Balinese culture, gamelan, grief and spirituality: “For me, that hymn sits right there at the tip of the sword, on the cusp between the light and the dark, between hope and despair.”
At the conclusion of his lecture, Grimshaw turned the focus to those around him who have grappled with grief through music in their own ways, recognizing that though we struggle with individual trials, we are not struggling alone. Because it is through community that we make it through our trials, closeness and connection were a priority for Grimshaw as he helped design the Music Building.
“When we settled on the idea of this kind of vineyard-style music hall, its main appeal was to completely rethink the relationship between the performers and the audience,” said Grimshaw. “The idea is that rather than music at one end of a box being played to an audience at the other box, the audience gathers around the music up close, warming their souls like friends around a fire.”
Grimshaw has personally been impacted by the warming effects of the art community in the very music building he helped bring to life. But more important than the space is the artists who fill it who work to understand something bigger than themselves.
“I can think of no better company to gather with than my family and my dear friends in this space,” said Grimshaw. “Many of whom have devoted their lives and entwined their discipline with dedication to using art to explore and understand the mortal struggle between light and dark, grief and joy — contemplating the darkest abyss and the eternal expanse together.”