Nicholas Vella Laurenti writes:
As a former long-time student of artist and musician Chev. Mro Pawlu Grech, one teaching of his that I prize above all others is that contradiction is the fundamental principle of all art.
Pawlu Grech passed away on February 10. The timing and circumstances of this event present at least three contradictions, all coincidental but significant, nonetheless.
The first contradiction is that his death happened just 10 days shy of his 83rd birthday. The second is that it occurred in the recurrence of the national feast of his biblical namesake, whereas Pawlu, though by no means an atheist, was profoundly and viscerally averse to the idea and practice of organised religion.
But the most important contradiction is that, as a resident in a private old people’s home (Casa Antonia), Pawlu’s passage to the beyond took place during a lockdown that had started several months before. This means that while he drew plenty of comfort and solace from the regular visits of Amanda Tabone, his loyal and loving partner for almost 30 years whom he met in one last open-hearted exchange a few hours before his transition, Pawlu was fettered in his freedom and ability to communicate with his small but well-knit circle of friends, which also comprised a host of former students and admirers.
Within this circle, Pawlu imparted his timeless knowledge of life and art by an essentially oral mode of transmission. This meant that his teaching was never theoretical and dogmatic but always deeply personal and refreshingly anecdotal. The dark warm timbre of his voice resonates in my mind whenever I reflect on his teachings or pass them on to others.
Pawlu exercised the orality of his pedagogy in the context of a close and friendly relationship with each and every one of his students. These relationships, nurtured over many years, were not ends in themselves but served as vehicles to another more intimate and esoteric relationship, that between the student and the art he or she would aspire to master.
A teacher who formed his students in this manner must have been himself formed likewise. Pawlu would often say that the experiences that moulded him were not so much his formal studies at institutions like the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he stood out as a very gifted and accomplished student, as his meetings and associations with key figures like composers Igor Strawinsky, Luciano Berio and Luigi Dallapiccola, conductor Franco Ferrara, actress Carla Bizzarri and musicologist Hans Keller. (Pawlu lived most of these seminal experiences in Italy, where he would in his last days choose to be cremated.)
Pawlu thought of these two strands of his artistic formation not as complementary but as antagonistic and contradictory, in that the teachings and insights he received from these enlightened men and women liberated his mind from the shackles and rigidity of his academic training.
When, free of this cumbersome baggage, Pawlu Grech set out to write a treatise on musical composition, he chose to use the language not of words but of sounds, which eventually became his two books of Ideograms for piano, published and premiered in London in the early eighties. It is significant that this choice came about after Pawlu had originally thought of starting this brilliantly creative work with the quasi-biblical words: “In the beginning God created counterpoint.”