Musicians, Dancers, Equations and Aviation

Origins

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Greg La Traille, (b. 1951), is an American composer and visual artist. He has been drawing and painting since childhood. Due to a youthful heart problem which prevented participation in sports, the young La Traille took up art, including model building, painting, drawing, film making and sculpture. An early interest in music was perked by his father’s love of Stravinsky and small jazz ensembles and his mother’s love of Broadway musicals. LaTraille began piano lessons at an early age and while still in high school had composed piano music, chamber music, band and orchestral works including a viola concerto and a four movement symphony. While at Arizona State University, he studied with composers Ronald Lo Presti and Grant Fletcher as well as occasional private composition lessons with the visiting Vincent Persichetti, who spoke highly in the classroom of La Traille’s concertos. 

His Oboe Quintet is available on Crystal Records, catalog # 723. Click here.

Through the 1990s, La Traille was the Overseas Classical Music Sales Director for Tower Records, setting up classical music departments in Tower stores in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.

Music

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Greg La Traille is a composer with two degrees in music. His Oboe Quintet is available on CD from Crystal Records. Among his many compositions, he has composed a ballet titled “Ojibwa” (he is part Chippewa) as well as a "Viola Concerto" and a large four-movement "Symphony."

An orchestral composer, La Traille served as a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, teaching advanced orchestration as well as 19th and 20th Century theory. Currently, given the expense and bias involved with large orchestras performing original 21st century music, La Traille composes music using modern applications of computer software to generate clear-cut scores and parts, state-of-the-art examples from sampled live instruments, which serves as a calling card for live performances.

La Traille's Oboe Quintet is featured on the album, Rendezvous and Dreams on Crystal Records, available at www.ArkivMusic.com

Artwork

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As an artist, La Traille has worked in oils, pencil and pen & ink. His “Rhythm-Ink” series, featuring classical and jazz musicians, captures the flow and dynamic feel of music in performance. The style is reminiscent of Art Deco and the Jazz Age. 
His “Equation-Art” series interprets symbolically actual famous equations represented in the vivid paintings or applied in the pen and ink subjects as if they were equations, capturing just the aesthetic essence of the subject.  

La Traille has also worked in oils producing highly individual landscapes, portraits and abstract designs. A versatile artist comfortable in somewhat realist as well as abstract art and music.

Aviation Art:

La Traille’s aviation art, usually in oils, has the nostalgic quality and dramatic sense of adventure of model box top art from the 1950s and 60s. It may not be as exquisitely refined as other superb aircraft art but you can smell the oil and feel the prop wash. In these paintings he captures specific types of planes as well as a giddy feeling of flight and the precarious uneasiness of aircraft in motion.

Other Pursuits... Present and Past:

Greg La Traille has an avid interest in amateur astronomy and has observed via various telescopes, planets, star clusters and galaxies. With a small close-knit group of friends, he made comedy films, inspired by their love of Laurel & Hardy, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges and Jacques Tati. He inherited from his father a love of rare and beautiful automobiles which his father restored. In childhood, La Traille also built HO train sets, model airplanes and played in a Lockheed T33 Shooting Star jet flight simulator he and his father restored.