SEE Magazine
March 27, 2008

Spooky Strings
By Prosper Prodaniuk

“I will tell you one thing and it will not sound modest,” cautions local composer Piotr Grella-Mozejko. “One composition teacher told me that it takes a lot of guts to write a string quartet after Beethoven and Bartok. With this piece I can say that there’s nothing like it in Western classical music because of its accumulation of aggression and energy. I wanted to make it complex, very dense, yet make it speak directly.”
Grella-Mozejko’s String Quartet No. 3 (TrancePaining: Black Wings Has My Angel) is 12 minutes of furious, driving cacophony that the composer instantly felt would be something special. “The work was inspired by my hatred of U.S. international policy about this war in Iraq that has been built around a lie and will remain a lie,” he says. “I was really fucking angry.” At the same time he was reading Elliott Chaze’s legendary 1953 crime novel Black Wings Has My Angel.

“Everything is fucked up in the end,” he says, describing the demise of the book’s antihero, an unrepentant ex-convict who commits a bloody robbery of an armoured car. “I understand the feeling of a man who feels that he’s committing a crime for some higher reason, like soldiers do,” he says. Grella-Mozejko says he invented the odd portmanteau term “TrancePaining” in the title as a way to capture this mood, the auditory equivalent of perpetual pain: “My saxophone concerto of 2006 was a preliminary study in this kind of aesthetic—a kind of uncompromising avenue between intellectually driven music and emotionally driven pop music like hip-hop and techno.”

It’s one thing for an Edmonton compose to say he’s influenced by hip-hop, but it’s quite another to wind up collaborating on a piece with world-renowned DJ Spooky. “The collaboration idea was that of the Penderecki String Quartet, who commissioned my piece,” Grella-Mozejko explains. “They are pretty hot these days, and DJ Spooky had some of their recordings and was a fan of them. The PSQ had this idea of doing a gig in the nightclub and they decided to do a live gig together. He asked for some new quartets, they sent him about 60, and they said ‘Hey, Piotr, he picked yours.’ He wanted to do it at the very end of the gig because he felt it was so powerful. And after the gig there was a hip-hop party.”

Grella-Mozejko is pleased that Spooky’s rendition, which debuted during a March 15 performance at Wilfred Laurier University in Kitchener-Waterloo, was not just a quick remix or cheap cut-up of the piece. Early in the mix, Spooky manipulates the sound of the quartet and drops in some samples—but beats only enter towards the end when some rugged jungle breaks perfectly complement the ostinati, punctuated by massive hooting and hollering.

“A couple of friends wondered, ‘Why didn’t he do more?’” Grella-Mozejko says. “But the piece is so dense that it would lose momentum if you did too much. I thought that he did a very smart thing to limit himself and just explore the expressive value and impact of certain fragments, and the collaboration sounds more like a string quartet with signal processing. His experience with pieces by Ligeti, Xenakis and others show that he knows what he’s doing.”

So it was a successful foray into DJ culture, then? “Oh yes,” Grella Mozejko gleefully replies. “This is one of the greatest things to happen in my career. The response to the piece seems to be of the most immediate kind. People really dig it. The PSQ have played it several times now. They are preparing a New York debut in Lincoln Centre in May and they said the best response was in Prague. With the gig with Spooky getting such phenomenal response, we might try to get them to do their collaboration here.”

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