Urquitaqtuq
(Sheltered, but with Gusts of Wind)
Trevor Grahl
Ensemble: Wind Orchestra
Duration: 15:00
Year of Composition: 2007
Premiered by: McGill Wind Orchestra (Alain Cazes, director)
Publisher: self-published
Available: Yes
How to Acquire: Composer
Links:
Winner of the 2007 John Weinzweig Award from the SOCAN Foundation
Program Notes:
For some reason, not just if you’re Canadian, (but it seems to help), we somehow get bitten by the ‘north’ bug. A sudden obsession or cogent curiousity to simply “go north”. Sometimes this is borne out of curiousity. The expanse making up about 70% of our landmass, yet only 20% of our population stretches hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, standing in stark comparison with the busy and replete cities that I've mostly inhabited during my short life. Life up there is so different than what I know, or what I've ever experienced. There is also a painful history there, one of coercion and conformity, of habituation and hardening. It's also something I've never experienced first hand, but have lived, in a way, through literature. This piece reflects my yearning to ‘go north’. It reflects something that is free, a system that has found its own way and can continue, and doesn’t resist when a new system is introduced, changing the very structure of it's identity. A return to the old isn’t possible, but could be garnered, surely, by looking forward as well as backward (this lovely Marshall McLuhan photo comes to mind). I was experimenting with aleatoric techniques I had discovered as a student from the scores of Lutosławski, and found that the application of these techniques for a large wind ensemble could adequately reflect my interest in huge shifting soundmasses, blizzards of cold icy sound, with heavy steely flakes of snow crashing about, or delicate diamond-ice textures, sparkling and gently shimmering.
(Program note by Trevor Grahl)