“I played instruments ― drums, piano, guitar, saxophone ― and then I began to write music on piano. It was nothing complex, kind of repetitive film score stuff, and then one day I woke up and decided that this was something I could put all my energy into.” Aran O’Grady is a fourth-year student in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, studying composition, and is also the arranger for Trinity Orchestra. An arranger is someone who adapts or re-works a composition for particular voices or instruments or for another style of performance.
Trinity Orchestra have recently been challenging pre-conceived notions of what an orchestra can and should play; since 2012, they’ve played music by Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, Gorillaz and, most recently, Sufjan Stevens. The arranger is an invisible yet invaluable part of this process, as he takes music played by a band of four or five and makes it playable for a whole orchestra. O’Grady cites film score composers, such as Hans Zimmer, Thomas Newman and Ennio Morricone as influences: “Apart from the household names of classical music, I was pretty ignorant.” While a lot of O’Grady’s friends in the Academy of Music would have grown up playing and listening to classical music, he did not. He sees this as a benefit: “I think that has helped me in not discriminating between genres of music.” With his background more in electronic and atmospheric film scores, but his training in classical, O’Grady says that, for him, “it’s all about trying to find a happy medium between the two.”
When asked how he got into arranging, he said that “in second year, I was asked to arrange some pieces for a wedding and once I became good at it, I decided that I wanted to do something for Trinity Orchestra.” The first pieces that O’Grady arranged for Trinity Orchestra were taken from the music of Sufjan Stevens: “Sufjan Stevens was a go-to for me because it is so orchestral anyway, it was straight-forward to rearrange.” Speaking of the Orchestra’s upcoming slot at Metropolis, O’Grady says: “we wanted to do something more upbeat, something that you could dance to. So we made a big list and whittled it down to about three or four, ran it by the organisers of Metropolis, and they wanted LCD Soundsystem.”
In terms of the difficulties he faced, O’Grady said that “with LCD, the song choice was limited. James Murphy’s voice is so iconic and songs like Losing my Edge couldn’t really be done because the vocals are more spoken and not lyrical, it’s just a slow build-up”. But other tracks such as I Can Change, Dance Yrself Clean and Someone Great, he explains, “have driving basslines and cool melodies”, which allows him to use different sections of the orchestra to play them. Because LCD’s music has its roots in 80s dance, O’Grady says he has been able to add little homages to the musical styles of that era. He also thinks that “there has always been something so expansive about LCD Soundsystem’s music which allows it to translate very well into an orchestral piece.”
Speaking more generally about the difficulties of re-arranging contemporary music, O’Grady explains that “a lot of Rock songs can be in A major or E major, which are not good for orchestral colouring”. He also takes all of the electric guitar out of the songs because “with its six strings, the electric guitar can cover the whole texture of an orchestra and be extremely intrusive”. O’Grady would sum up his style as an arranger as “trying to be as true as you can to the original, while also staying innovative.” It seems that the greatest challenge for any arranger is how to change the way the song is being played without taking away from the character of the piece or the emotions it invokes.
Trinity Orchestra as a whole are unique in their approach to classical music and their performances have become very popular; a video of their 2012 rendition of Daft Punk has close to a million views on Youtube. O’Grady hopes that people seeing their favourite music being played by “strange” instruments, such as the bassoon, will make them want to start to play them. As for O’Grady himself, after some “respite”, he would like to continue arranging, possibly as part of a collaborative unit, doing something “niche and unique”. O’Grady ended the interview by promising a surprise for everyone during their set at Metropolis, saying “it might seem a bit obvious, but it’s going to be meta and I think people will enjoy it.”
Trinity Orchestra will be playing the music of LCD Soundsystem at 3:30pm on Sunday on the Main Stage at Metropolis and O’Grady hosts a radio show called Modern Sounds at 11:30am on Mondays on 103.2 Dublin City FM.
