Michael Grebla on composition, scholarship and the silent year

Film composer and General Sir John Monash Scholar Michael Grebla on the year the orchestral commissions dried up, what he wrote when nobody was paying, and the scholarship work that gave him the time to finish a piece he had been carrying for three years.

Michael Grebla is a Sydney composer who took up a General Sir John Monash Foundation scholarship in 2019 to study at the Royal College of Music. He talked to the bureau in May 2020 about the year the commissions stopped and the work that arrived in their absence.

"Composition is a strange profession in a normal year."

Composition is a strange profession in a normal year. In 2020 it became a stranger profession. The film projects fell out of the calendar in March. By April the concert work was gone too. By May I had finished a string quartet I had been carrying since 2017.

The scholarship paid for the room I worked in. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. The room is the work.

The Scholars · Michael Grebla · 4 May 2020 · Archived by Bridge Street Bureau