It seems these days that every college student wants to be a DJ and that we’ve lost a long-held appreciation of pure singing. However, on Penn’s campus, you can hear quiet humming while studying in Huntsman Hall and a raw voice belting for large crowds in the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. All you have to do is look for Grace Gramins.
It actually runs in the family for Grace. Her mother moved to New York City to audition for Broadway, and while doing so, she worked on Wall Street. It makes sense that Grace has been raised with that intersection in mind. In New York, she started her educational career at the Special Music School, where she first learned violin and then began to compose music.
As she continued songwriting, she developed an interest in business in tandem. Throughout high school, her volunteer work was focused on helping with organizations’ marketing, which had natural intersections with her interest in producing music.
While she identified this intersection between business and production as an interest when applying to Wharton, she was able to see it through with her undergraduate experience in marketing courses.
“Writing music and editing it to cater to my consumers was something I was inherently doing,” Grace said. “But then I was able to attach it to a real concept and principle in my marketing class.”
The same goes for her Management 1010 course: “I learned about horizontal and vertical diversification, and I moved from writing to producing music which was vertical diversification in a way, but I had no words for it until I took that class and was able to understand exactly what I was doing.”
Business gave her the vocabulary behind some of the more pragmatic decisions she was making in her creation of music. It also gave her the ability to understand recent movements and trends in the music business.
When she began to write music in high school, she viewed it very entrepreneurially, akin to creating a business or product, which was where marketing came in. When she refers to music business, she means applying principles of management and finance to it.
When it comes to finance, Grace says that as a music creator, she has enjoyed learning about different deals within the business: “The intersection of all that has been really exciting for me to apply my passion for music to the different concepts I’m learning in my business classes here in Wharton.”
In February, Grace produced and released a single, “Falling.” While her business education taught her to tie in some of the more pragmatic, less emotional aspects of the art form, she also utilized the music department at Penn. While making the song in her second year, Grace took Professor Anna Weesner’s songwriting course as part of her Popular Music and Jazz Studies minor.
“It was a great forum to connect with other students who were passionate about songwriting,” she said. “Adding music classes throughout my four years has been a great way to learn about music in a more formal setting.”
While her education played a large role in her production process, she also found connectivity and inspiration from the people around her. She played the song and received live feedback from Penn Counterparts, her acapella group. Counterparts is Penn’s oldest all-gender pop and jazz acapella group, and John Legend was a part of Counterparts during his time at Penn. As the music director this year, Grace is responsible for musical arranging the music and conducting their shows.
“I had watched Counterparts YouTube videos before coming to Penn, and I had written about them in my [application] essays,” she reminisces. “That’s opened such an awesome door for me to have a community on campus of people studying and being interested in different things outside the group.”
Even beyond the classroom and her social circles, access to Wharton’s faculty has helped her navigate the business of music creation. When she got a contract in the fall of her first year, her Legal Studies 1010 professor looked over it with her.
While all these experiences at Penn continue to overlap, Grace still finds time for personal endeavors.
“I’m going to continue immersing myself with Wharton and business,” she said. “I’m currently working on producing another song, so hopefully that comes out soon.”
—Alex Zhou, W’25, C’25
Posted: January 15, 2025
