With his album ‘Tapestry of Life: Everyday Whispers’ Pieter de Graaf set to music an inner world woven with the threads of thoughts, reflections, and memories passing through our minds on a daily basis. A place where gentle whispers dance alongside the loving embrace of cherished recollections. Alternated with shadowed corners where the hues turn darker, and the atmosphere more melancholic. The interplay of light and darkness giving depth to our existence.

Acclaimed Dutch pianist/composer and recent Edison Classical Award winner Pieter de Graaf has always had a restless soul, a need to seek out the new and the interesting. “I’m never satisfied with things,” he says. “I gravitate towards change.” As a child he’d play The Beatles then jump to Chopin; as a student at the prestigious Conservatory of Rotterdam (Codarts), jazz gave way to playing with orchestras and exploring hiphop. And so 2019’s Fermata, a record where de Graaf really took his time to explore and write, painstakingly building songs up from single notes and triads, was followed by the Vortex EP, a whirlwind of a project that saw him experiment with loops and electronica, and collaborate with revered beat-maker and multi-instrumentalist Binkbeats. The follow up album Equinox was “the next step – not taking an age over things, not creating in a hurricane of work” according to Pieter. It’s a record that subtly incorporates the electronic textures and “edginess” he is so mesmerized by, yet one rooted in his deep love for romantic, emotional piano music. It’s also one that he felt confident enough to tackle on his own. “I’m doing much more by myself now – the producing, the arranging, tweaking my set up. It’s almost all me.”

Such confidence is the result of recent change, in his daily life as much as his approach to music and composition. Frustration and stress are now worked through in his studio and poured into his songs, serving as a source of energy. Setbacks are seen as a positive, a reason to push boundaries. And above all, he overhauled his lifestyle – eating healthily, quitting smoking, doing more sports. “A different mentality to life,” he says. “A different way of inspiring myself.” 

All this has given him balance, and opened him up to music’s cathartic power. “Healing,” is how he describes time spent just enjoying his instrument.