The work of Trevor Grahl is as colourful as it is diverse. Earlier this year, the Amsterdam-based Canadian composer was working on a recording of his 2018 composition Of Ancient Days in the Orgelpark, a former church that houses eight organs and a harmonium. Johan Luijmes, the artistic leader of the venue, commissioned Grahl to write a companion piece to Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale partita Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig, BWV 768. Grahl’s piece gives voice to his conception of the creation of the world. The seven-movement composition opens with a prelude, which is followed by six parts, each representing one day. The movements are interspersed with Bach’s chorale and its variations, which function as the nights. This is the way Grahl prefers to work.
“If someone tells me, ‘Here’s carte blanche, do what you want,’ I go into a knot—there are too many choices,” he says. “I work best when someone makes a frame for me. So I had a frame, and I became creative. Something I find interesting is to have new music on old instruments, or find new avenues for them. Johan [Luijmes] wanted to play this on a Baroque organ that was recently built in the Orgelpark. You can play it from a keyboard but also from a digital console. The piece took me a long time to write, because I was also discovering the new sounds of these instruments. As an organist, it was crazy for me to imagine that.
“Since I was young, I have always tried to hack an organ, to make it sound like something that it wasn’t. And all of a sudden, with this organ, it is possible.”
It wasn’t just the instrument that Grahl needed to tackle. He also had to come to grips with Bach’s largest chorale partita, which includes the chorale melody followed by eleven variations. One option would have been to reflect on it and use fragments as building blocks. “I found it difficult doing that with Bach,” Grahl says. “That piece is already theme-heavy. Then one day it crossed my mind that I could try to tell the creation story in sound. That way I can hook in with Bach and I am not completely going against him, because of the biblical topic.” Grahl had been reading the Canadian author Tomson Highway and was inspired by his description of Cree creation myths, which reminded him of ideas around composing. “You start with one thing, and you put something else on top of that. That way you keep growing it.”
In “Prelude: In the Beginning (Unda Maris),” the first movement, Grahl uses the sound of magnets to convey the feeling of an image described in the Bible of the world starting as a void, with the wind blowing over the water. “There is no air [in the organ pipes], no pitch, no life energy, just abstract clacking,” he says. In the second movement—“The First Day: Filament”—the idea of “let there be light” becomes “let there be sound,” and a gigantic motor blows life and energy into the pipes, “making them fulfill their function, making a big spectral chord bloom.”
For each successive “day,” Grahl would add layers to create sound variety. The fifth movement—“Tourbillon des Étoiles”—sparkles with the Zimbelstern, a mechanical peal of small bells mounted on a starlike object that is activated by a stop. “I based all the pitch material on the bell sounds, the star movements,” he says. “‘Au Fond des Bois,’ the movement about animals, uses all the stops on the organ and lots of different effects. When humans come along in the last movement, ‘Ecce Homo,’ it becomes quite simple, whereas until that movement, I have been building up, making the sound more detailed, in terms of registration.” This last movement builds up to a climax but finally subsides, apparently making the music come full circle—just air blowing, then ending, at last with the clacking sounds that started the piece.
The theatrical quality of Grahl’s music is inspired in part by the influence of his former partner. “He has a deep affiliation with theatre and sometimes performs on stage. He would drag me to all these weird theatre events in Greece,” Grahl says. “When someone talks about musical form, I would call it musical dramaturgy. For me, it’s the same. It is the drama of sound through time—what comes where, how long should it last, what should it say, what should it do? It’s all those things. I think of a mise-en-scène: Who are all these people on stage, what are they doing there, what is their identity, how are they telling the story?”
Kápote, a piece he wrote in 2017 for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, is rooted in a 1907 poem written by Egypt-born Greek poet Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (widely known in English as C. P. Cavafy). “It is about listening to the voices of people who are not around anymore, how you hear things in your memory as you listen to these voices,” Grahl says. “I love Greek songs from the 1920s and later. The singer Danai [Stratigopoulou], who started as a crooner, became an ambassador for this music. I heard a song of hers in the film The Lobster, and I wanted to take this and put it in a different context.
“In Kápote, the singer, who is a narrator and a crooner, is like a [cabaret host]. At first, she is simply narrating, and in the second half she transforms and the tone of the piece changes completely. I got that idea from David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive, in which he twists an artificial situation after an hour and a half, and the audience has to re-evaluate what they have seen up to that point. In my piece, the music is twisted into more intense dimensions. When the last lines of the poem appear, the music from the beginning returns and triggers the listener’s memory.” Grahl is fascinated by rollercoasters and haunted houses and frequently visited them in San Diego, where he lived before moving to Amsterdam. Audiences often want to have a similar experience—“having the shit scared out of [them] in all kinds of ways”—when they go to a concert,” he says. “They want you to share something like that with them. That’s how I think about Kápote. I like to play with these real-life situations that people know.”
Grahl, who was born in Rankin, Ontario, received his undergraduate degree from the Schulich School of Music in Montreal before moving to San Diego to pursue a master’s degree in music composition at the University of California. “When I was doing my master’s, I wondered where my voice was. Richard Ayres [with whom Grahl studied in Amsterdam] told me, ‘You are sitting in this jungle of stuff, and I think you should do what makes you feel good and balance it out, and you are actually in there.’”
Carl Stalling’s music for Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies stuck with Grahl, who recalls a scene from the 1938 short “That Daffy Doc” in which Daffy gets stuck in an iron lung, causing his head and hands to swell up. For that scene, Stalling—often credited as musical director rather than composer—orchestrated and arranged the jazz standard “You Go to My Head.”
“Stalling would say it’s not his music, he just puts it together. That’s how I feel—like I am taking little things that I grew up with, that I heard, and putting them together in a new equilibrium. As a composer, it is hard for me to say when it works,” Grahl says, adding, “When it’s the work of someone else, it is easier.”
He feels a kinship with Charles Ives, who integrated elements from his childhood into his music. In 2021, Grahl reimagined song settings of several works by Gustav Mahler and Ives for a project with the Austrian chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien and the American baritone Thomas Hampson. For Ives’ Tom Sails Away, he has the orchestra whistle the opening of the piece. “All these people whistling ends up sounding like a musical saw, or something you’d hear on a 1920s record,” says Grahl, adding that one must be delicate when asking musicians to do things they don’t usually do. “I keep it simple—they’re not trained whistlers, after all! But the effect is beautiful and gentle. And someone told me that it totally sounded like Grahl.
“Some composers attempt to completely break with the past in their music. I was never very good at that. My music is about my personal past and sense of nostalgia. I see myself as a big synthesizer. It is not particularly original, but I just want to synthesize the things that I love. I love Mahler, I love pop. How can I spin these things and make them my own? Richard Ayres gave me permission to feel that I could do that.”
Folly, which harkens back to Grahl’s childhood love of cartoons, was commissioned by the TROMP International Percussion Competition—held in Eindhoven every two years— as the compulsory work in the final round of its 2022 edition. It was part virtuoso concerto for percussion and objects and part soundtrack to The Cure, a silent cartoon from Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series from the early twentieth century. Each soloist had to take into account the ensemble while synchronizing their actions with the events on the screen and playing the instruments and objects as the score prescribed. This included taking a bite of an apple, blowing a duck call to be timed with onscreen dialogue, and pulling a Christmas cracker. “I wanted to test them in an excruciatingly virtuoso piece, which should be totally unconventional in a competition setting,” he says. “I wanted the audience to be able to see if something was off, which is not always that obvious in a concerto.”
Grahl’s music is rarely heard in concert in Canada. His Screen Memories was performed at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s 2018 New Creations festival. Quatuor Bozzini and Les Boréades de Montréal commissioned him and Thierry Tidrow to write interludes for John Dowland’s Lachrimae Pavan. Completed in 2021, his six-movement Ephemerides was presented online but has yet to be performed before an audience.
Grahl is not certain how he envisions his future as a composer. “Part of me is conflicted,” he says. “I am currently working as a teacher of composition. When I come home from teaching, I often don’t have the energy to compose. Should I be like Charles Ives and have the stability of a job and compose in my free time? Or should I freelance so I am able to work all the time? I only get to work when I have a project. I am rather like a blacksmith, who makes custom parts on hire—maybe like my father, who worked for an experimental nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, or my great-uncle John, who actually was the village blacksmith. They needed a task to get to work. This seems to be my current reality. But there are other ways, ways that come from inside rather than outside, and I want to change that. I think as I get older, it will start to happen.”
René van Peer is a music journalist from the Netherlands. He writes about improvised and contemporary composed music, world music, and sound art. He also writes program notes for several Dutch venues, such as the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam. Leonardo and Songlines have published his articles and reviews. Het Apollohuis published his book Interviews with sound artists. He is artistic adviser for composers, ensembles and festivals, and is a member of the music committee of a major cultural foundation in the Netherlands, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.