Quaderno II

In this follow-up to the previous work, Grech is here too concerned with establishing his identity as a composer. However, unlike the exploratory nature of Quaderno 1, a more mature Grech with a clearer artistic identity than before undertakes to almost spell out his debt to those masters of the Western musical tradition on whose footsteps he intends to follow, namely Bartók, Debussy, Satie and Stravinsky. As Grech himself said about this work, “I wrote this work primarily as a set of homages to Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky and to a lesser extent, Satie. I felt indebted to these four composers because they liberated me from the suffocating stagnation of the conservatoire.” Thus it seems that the unconscious influence of these four beacons of the musical tradition in the twentieth century has completed its internal process of assimilation in Grech‘s being so that Grech is now able to consciously delineate each composer’s influence on his aesthetic from that of the others and write a homage to each one of them which is first and foremost a product and testimony of Grech‘s own artistic identity rather than an imitation or an attempted emulation of each composer’s style and aesthetic. Therefore, Grech here remoulds the achievements of the recent past to throw light on the musical path to be followed in the future.