N.B. At various times, I've written brief narratives of my piano études for the benefit of Hayes Biggs — writing liner notes for them — and for various students writing dissertations on them. Here's what I said and when I said it. Sorry about the inconsistent formatting. N.B. These are not the actual liner notes, some of which may be found here.
UNMANIFESTO AND NARRATIVE (2002)
UNMANIFESTO AND NARRATIVE (2002)
I am not a pianist and I can’t play these etudes, except for
a few of the very easy ones. The collection didn’t start out as a collection,
and I wasn’t aware I was writing etudes until Lyn Reyna told me that I was,
three years after I’d written the first one. The reason that I had written
several short, concentrated (and greatly virtuosic) piano pieces instead of
more substantial pieces was that I wasn’t prepared to write a long, monster
piano piece like many composers my age were doing in the late 80s (I knew mine
would be terrible by comparison, and I didn’t feel I had anything to say). The
first etude (E-Machines) was written (in 1988) as a kind of joke piece, to get
pianists off my back.
And now there are more than forty of them.
I’ve tried to come up with a pat explanation for why I’ve
written so many of them (and want to write even more), but I haven’t come up
with anything yet that explains it all. I can say for certain that, at first,
writing etudes functioned as a kind of creative recreation – I gave myself a
rule that an etude had to be written in six days or less (since E-Machines was
written in six days), could not be revised, and could not have any a priori
notions of how the whole piece should go (i.e., I couldn’t think about the
piece before I started it). The fun part was the seat-of-the-pants approach to
composition, which was in opposition to my usual approach to longer
instrumental pieces. I suppose I usually do my best when I don’t know what I’m
doing, and I like the feeling of exhilaration and frustration at trying to work
out things that are new to me, and knowing that any piece can go in just about
any direction at any time.
To that end, at least half of the etudes I’ve written have functioned
as a sort of compositional respite. When I’m having trouble working through
things in longer pieces, I tend to put them aside and write an etude. Writing
unrelated pieces that are brief and single-minded helps keep the gears moving
and helps me return to the bigger piece with a fresh perspective (and reminds
me that I know something about composing). Other etudes have served as little
playgrounds, places where I can play games with ways that notes get put
together, and where I can sharpen my chops for use in other pieces. Many of
them have been written with specific performers in mind, and with suggestions
given by the players themselves. And a few have been written because I had
great titles that cried out for pieces.
Nonetheless, I think these pieces tend to be a little
conservative formally: almost all of them have expository music, developmental
music, and a recapitulation of sorts, sometimes with a coda. There tends to be
clear voice leading, tension and release, phrases, and lots of accumulations
that are released suddenly. The joy of composing, then, I guess, is discovering
lots of different ways to make radically different pieces that are all exciting,
expressive and interesting, given that they do not vary wildly in form. And
little by little, I think I’m learning how to write for the piano. Anyone who
has not heard the etudes of Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff,
Ligeti or Bolcom might actually think that I can write for the piano.
I would probably still have only three etudes, not called
etudes, if it were not for fabulous pianists like Amy who have picked these
pieces up and played the caca out of them. More than recreation, and more than
inquisitiveness with notes, I guess I continue to write piano etudes because I
know that whatever I write will get the doody played out of it.
--------------------------
Brief
opening remarks – September,
2003
The
etudes as a collection are somewhat eclectic, though that isn’t really the
point. I wrote every one, and I endeavored to make each one sound like only I
could have written it. On the other hand, many of them have served as
quasi-recreational respites from other, longer and “more serious” pieces. But
it is clear that writing these pieces has been valuable to my development as a
composer and musician; listening to them in sequence you can sense a real
loosening up of the style, and especially more resourcefulness with the
materials, as time goes by. There is a scowl-faced seriousness to many of the
earlier ones that reflects the same scowl-faced seriousness in the music I was
writing at the time. By writing the etudes, I seem to have learned how to
loosen up and have more joy in the simple act of invention, and also how to
write longer spans of music without such frequent formal articulations. The
phrases and sections in, say, BAM, Trillage, and Mano a Mano are
really rather short, and it makes the pieces feel somewhat overarticulated to
me in hindsight; meanwhile, pieces like Sixth Appeal, Pink Tab,
and Durchrauscht die Luft feel almost like single long breaths by
comparison. Too, I think that I learned in these pieces how to be more careful
in varying the harmonic rhythm, in varying the phrase length, and perhaps
beginning to understand how to make an analog to a Schenkerian middleground in
my music, at least to help me understand where a piece is going as I’m writing
it. And of course, before E-Machines
I hadn’t a clue how to write fast music.
So
the pieces don’t feel eclectic so much as they feel like singular responses to
unique compositional problems. Developing some surface figures that I heard in
James P. Johnson’s playing is necessarily going to give far different results
than developing some surface features from a Liebeslieder waltz, for instance.
And I seem to have hoodwinked a large number of listeners – the etudes are
essentially atonal, and hardly anyone hears them that way. Neither do I, by the
way, but the note-to-note procedures of these pieces and of all my pieces are
essentially drawn from Schoenberg – and the middlegrounds, maybe from
Renaissance vocal music. Hey, but what do I know?
ADDENDUM 2020. I no longer think that the études are atonal, despite some motivic procedures shared with some atonal music. The music is mostly quasi-tonal, with goal-directed articulations accomplished by voice leading. I've always been good at not knowing what I am doing, but sometimes I'm good at figuring out just what that was, after the fact.
ADDENDUM 2020. I no longer think that the études are atonal, despite some motivic procedures shared with some atonal music. The music is mostly quasi-tonal, with goal-directed articulations accomplished by voice leading. I've always been good at not knowing what I am doing, but sometimes I'm good at figuring out just what that was, after the fact.
--------------------
#1
E-MACHINES
For
several years after graduate school, several pianists had been bugging me to
write pieces for them, for whatever reason. Quite a few composers my age and a
little older had been making small reputations for themselves with big,
Romantic, slurpy, heavy, loud, overdramatic and self-important piano pieces,
and that seemed very unattractive to me. I wasn’t ready to write a big piano
piece (I probably still am not ready), and I didn’t feel I had anything to say
in the form, nor was I all that good at writing for the piano.
In
the meantime, I had met Martin Butler, who was a Composition Fellow at
Tanglewood with me in 1982, and I talked him into doing grad work at Princeton
with me. For a while we were housemates. Martin is an extremely accomplished
pianist, and he bought a crappy piano for composing, which was placed next to
the front door in our house. Martin himself is a very nervous kind of person,
always with a jiggling leg, a cigarette, a drink of coffee, or something to keep
his body moving very fast (I think sometimes his leg jiggles fast enough to
enter another dimension briefly). He also was able to play repeated notes (such
as in Bartok’s Bear Dance) with one
hand, rather than with alternating hands, which was the only way I could play
them. This got to be a running gag – every time I left the house or came in,
Martin would launch into a volley of machine-gun repeated notes. Martin also
asked me to write him a piano piece. Which I resisted doing for many years.
In
January, 1988, on a lark, I hopped on a plane to Phoenix and rented a small
apartment in order to write a piece. I’d never been in a warm climate in
January, and thought the new experience would be cool. And it was. So much so
that I finished my piece a week ahead of schedule, and had extra time to write
a little piece for Martin to get him off my back – and get a tan at the same
time. I decided to write a silly piece, probably worthless, that made light of
Martin’s perpetual motion and our running gag about repeated notes. And I
decided to take manuscript paper to a playground and write it outdoors over six
days (it might have been finished in fewer days except that I am pretty
fair-skinned). I was also making a few sly references to Martin’s tape piece
called Night Machines, so I called my
piece Nocturnal E-Machines, a title
that is, admittedly, not sly at all. Later, when the piece was published, I
dropped the first word (and recycled it for my third étude). Incidentally,
Martin eventually performed the piece eleven years after I wrote it.
The
year that I taught at Stanford, I hired Lyn Reyna, a local pianist, to premiere
E-Machines. It was not until the
dress rehearsal the day of the concert that I heard the piece for the first
time, that it actually sounded pretty good, and was kind of fun, too. For years
I had always gotten comments after performances that my music was a lot more
serious than I was – after this performance, one listener said he’d never seen
such a perfect fit between a composer’s personality and his piece. So in a way
this piece was a kind of watershed moment for me (not to mention, it helped me
learn how to write fast music). Incidentally, I fully expected that E-Machines would be unplayable (it is
merely awkward). Instead, it is by far my most performed piece, having been
performed well more than a hundred times. Don’t ask me why.
It
is from the experience with E-Machines
that I got my rules for etude-writing: writing left-to-right, no revisions, no
a priori notions of how the piece would go, and must be composed within six
days. The six-day rule has been violated only by Trillage and Luceole.
Composer talk
E-Machines has a symmetrical
structure because Martin liked to write pieces with symmetrical structures in
those days. At this time I was still thinking within all-combinatorial
hexachords and successive unfoldings of the whole chromatic via those
hexachords and their complements. By E-Machines
the practice was very loose, but I still thought that way. Accordingly, the
harmonic structure also is the formal structure: A-B-C-B-A, with the letters
representing both formal divisions and hexachord types. Each hexachord area
also is distinct registrally: A is high, B is low, and C is all the registers.
Each hexachord area also has a quote that fits in the hexachord: C has the
sixth symphony of Beethoven: B has an old winds piece called Flights of Col by Martler (bars 61-62);
and A has Für Elise (the hexachord is
completed with the D-flat in the cluster that follows the quote). E-Machines is
“in” Fsharp.
#2 BAM!
Karen
Harvey, a pianist friend in Boston, was to be sponsored in January, 1992 by the
Wang Center for the Performing Arts in a high-profile recital, and she told me
she wanted to play E-Machines on that
recital. Except that she didn’t want to get guff from the critics for
performing short pieces. So she asked if I could add a movement. In July, 1991,
at the Bellagio Center in Italy, I wrote this piece, outside (like E-Machines) and in six days. Like the
first piece, it has a symmetrical form articulated by register. And in the
middle it quotes E-Machines and
Mozart’s 40th Symphony, as well. In order to call it an étude, I had to say it
was an étude “about” something, and so I said it’s an étude on “swirls of
notes.” The title comes from something Karen wrote on the piano part to my
violin concerto (in which she played at Tanglewood) over a sforzando chord.
Composer talk
BAM! is my last piece
structured around the all-combinatorial hexachords, and since it’s meant to be
related to E-Machines, it also has a
symmetrical all-combinatorial hexachordal structure. Except this one I don’t
remember. Maybe A-B-C-D-C-B-A or something like that.
#3
NOCTURNAL
Lyn
Reyna, who had premiered E-Machines
wanted to take it and BAM! on the
road, and suggested it would make a nice suite if there were a slow piece, too.
She also intimated that both the earlier pieces could be classified as études,
and the new piece might as well be an étude, too. So I went back to E-Machines and wrote out the sequence of
repeated notes and reused that sequence in Nocturnal,
this time as slow, dreamy repeated notes; there is also an embedded quote from
the Tristan prelude in the second
section. Now with a nice suite of pieces that worked together, I was pretty
much sure I was done with études.
Composer talk
Also,
the opening of the piece returns veiled within the figuration, m. 34. The only
relationship it has to E-Machines is
the sequence of repeated notes. Note also that the repeated notes in the third
structural section are there but not notated with secondary stems – too
cumbersome a notation. Like E-Machines, this one is “in” Fsharp.
#4
TRILLAGE
The
pianist Alan Feinberg was putting together a project he called “the virtuoso
pianist” and asked if I could contribute a piece to it. Around this time, I
also got a tape of Alan playing George Edwards’s piano concerto with the Albany
Symphony, and I was very struck by his playing, and by the music, of the
written-out cadenza of that piece, particularly a substantial passage with slow
notes in the outer voices and trills in the middle parts. As a way of
acknowledging his performance and that piece, I decided to write this piece as
an etude on trills, all of it variations on this passage from George’s
concerto, which is heard in its original form as the beginning of Variation VI.
The fun part in writing this piece was in thinking of the various melodies as
“spirals” – that is, lines that would contract to two notes, which would speed
up until they became a trill. Which is sort of the main gesture of the piece.
It took me so long to get around to writing this piece that it was too late for
Alan’s project: he played E-Machines
instead. The piece was not premiered until five years after I wrote it, during
which time it had sold two hundred copies and was favorably reviewed in Piano and Keyboard magazine.
Composer talk
The
quoted part of George’s piece trilled around G-Aflat and B-Csharp. Accordingly,
the first two trills of the piece, the double trill ending the theme, and the
concluding double trill, are exactly those, and the four notes form a sort of
tonal fulcrum for the way I was thinking about the piece. Marty Boykan noted
that trills in this piece tend to speed up, but not to slow down. Finally, the
notes of George’s quote are within an octatonic scale, so the very ending uses
all eight notes of that octatonic scale in its harmony. This one is in B-Bflat.
#5
FIGURE EIGHT
Beff
gave me this title. In graduate school, octaves were something we were supposed
to avoid writing, for reasons that were never clearly explained (except with a
joke: it’s the only interval that Princeton composers can actually hear). This
piece was my way of putting that rule way
into the past, while also having fun thinking about the many different ways I
could split up octaves in the hands, etc. Most of the piece is a very fast one-
or two-part invention, with some of the hairiest and most difficult stuff I
have ever written. My favorite parts are when the two hands move in opposite
directions from the middle to the extremes while still being in octaves.
Composer talk
A
few brief lines return in augmentation, and the only one I remember is m. 30
returning in m. 53 ff. Allegro peine
is supposed to mean “so fast it hurts,” but don’t bring that up. This is my
first piece where I began a little obsession with alternating major and minor
thirds, still going strong. This piece is “in” B-Bflat.
#6
MANO A MANO
Pianist
Lisa Moore was new to New York,
and was frequently hired to play student pieces at Columbia when I taught
there. At one post-concert reception, she asked me to write her a piece that
would take advantage of whatever I thought she did best. When I saw her play
the Davidovsky piano Synchronism, I thought the speed (and altitude) of her
hands at the two-hand tremolo of the climax looked wild, and so I made her
piece an étude specifically on alternating hands in this fashion. The tremolo
chord from the Davidovsky piece is occasionally arpeggiated as a tune, in
finger pedaling, and is heard verbatim once as a passing chord.
Composer talk
The
notes for the “Lisa Moore” motto come from mapping the chromatic scale onto the
alphabet. There is also a parallel back story in the piece: the Csharp-Asharp
of the right hand and the low D of the left hand of the beginning of bar 4
begins as an intrusion, and gradually through the piece that same gesture
becomes part of the piece – hence the unremarkable nature of its appearance
(with G added) to end the piece. “Going for the Glory” (m. 54) is a graduate
school quote from Beff – what she said to me at a day-long party as I began my
fifteenth beer, setting the record. I was still able to stand.
#7
LES ARBRES EMBUÉS
Martin
Butler suggested to me that he’d like to play an étude by me “like Debussy,
with a simple melody floating over thick chords.” I wrote this piece at the
MacDowell Colony, trying to evoke a hazy, dreamy sort of world. I got the title
when I walked to breakfast one morning when the sun was shining brightly after
we had had a hard overnight rain, and several of the trees were literally
steaming because of the heat of the sun. The title means “steaming trees” in
French. Martin hasn’t played this piece, by the way.
Composer talk
When
I mapped Martin’s name onto the chromatic scale, I actually got the pitch for
the “B” of Butler wrong (it should be Dflat). To make up for that, and to make
my piece correct, I asked Martin if he wouldn’t mind changing his last name to
Cutler or Outler. He declined the invitation. “Corinne” is his live-in
girlfriend of the last 14 years or so, hence the dance of their two themes in
the middle of the piece. Marilyn calls the notation of bars 29-31 a “mind
fuck.” This one is “in” C.
#8
CLOSE ENOUGH FOR JAZZ
Another
one of the Princeton composer taboos was ostinatos, hence an étude on an
ostinato. Alas, the ostinato actually changes every once in a while, though its
rhythm is always identifiable, and the sequence of intervals stays the same.
This was written specifically for pianist and composer Sandra Sprecher to
premiere at the American Academy in Rome; as such, I endeavored to make the
harmonic language of this piece close to Sandra’s music, which at the time
sounded a lot like free jazz from the 1950s to me. Hence the title. The rockout
in the middle of this piece is very
hairy with its extra and missing sixteenths, and hand crossings.
Composer talk
I
am thinking that the ostinato theme of the piece may have been modeled on
Ligeti’s Hungarian Rock, which I had
heard only once – in a Music HUM class that I was observing. But I don’t
remember specifically. When the ostinato changes, it does retain recognizable
aspects, especially the rhythm – often, the notes change but the intervals
remain the same, as in 18 and 19. This one is “in” A.
#9
POLLICI E MIGNOLI, OR, THE VIRUS THAT ATE NEW YORK
I
wrote this one in Rome, too, and also with Sandra Sprecher in mind, to give her
an additional option when she played in Rome. The idea of thumbs and pinkies
came from a conversation with a pianist who mentioned bizarre technical studies
he had once learned that isolated just one or two fingers of each hand. The
“virus that ate New York” is a fast triplet figure that encroaches into the
staccato texture and eventually takes over. The triplet figure was actually a
parody of a thematic lick in a piece that Sandra had written for Beff and
herself, for bass clarinet and piano, which I liked a lot. Oddly, this piece
has been played by several pianists in England, but never in America. Until
now.
Composer talk
I
was trying to suggest A major-minor, thus giving me an opportunity, for the
first time in my music, to use a pedal in the bass as a way of creating musical
tension. Not to mention, making extremely clear formal references. The piece is
“in” A, which is undermined by the virus at the end.
#10
CORRENTE
In
my year in Rome, I had a dream one morning of piano music with a lot of running
figures that constantly descended to the bottom of the piano. The music was
beautiful, but all I was able to capture was the texture, which I couched in an
étude on left-hand running notes, accompanying a long-line melody that starts
and ends on A. The title refers, of course, to the dance form, but also in
Italian to electricity (current). It’s also the word used in Italian newspapers
that refers in weather reports to the jet stream. I was thinking of all of
them.
Composer talk
Obviously,
this one is “in” A, which marks all of the formal articulations.
ÉTUDES BOOK II
#11 Touch Typing.
This one was written at the American Academy in Rome in the
late spring, and taking seriously the premise (it must be played with index
fingers only) was the first sure sign that I was ready to go home (someone had
told me that Liszt had written some piano pieces with similarly wacky premises,
so it seemed okay). The idea came when I was sitting at a laptop computer with
David Rutherford, a scholar with a Rome Prize, trying to get his e-mail program
to work. He typed with only his index fingers, but very fast, and I mentioned
how fast he was typing despite using only two fingers. He smiled and remarked,
“so do you think I could be a piano player (pronounced pie-anny player)?” The
“theme” of the piece is asdfgh (where the left hand rests to touch-type on a
qwerty typewriter keyboard), or A-A-flat,D,F,G,B, and that figure gets used in
the opening gesture, and several other times in the piece as melody or bass
line. It has an obvious three-part structure, fast-slow-fast.
#12 Northpaw.
Soon after I started teaching at Brandeis, Lyn Reyna — who
had premiered E-Machines (#1) and Nocturnal (#3) — called me and asked if I
could write a right-hand piece as a gift to her friend Barbara Barclay, who had
fallen off a ladder and injured her left hand. I wrote it in my office over a
weekend. It’s a slow, dreamy piece based around F-sharp and A, with a slow
descent to the lowest A on the piano over a melody that stays close to the
register where it begins.
#13a Plucking A.
One of several etudes I simply had to write once I had
thought of a title for it. Marilyn Nonken was going to perform and record some
études, and we didn’t know yet which ones. I asked her husband Jay what sort of
étude I might think of writing for her, and he said, “why not something inside
the piano? She hates doing that.” So that is how this etude came to be. It
works well on lots of smaller pianos, but not on a Steinway D, because of the
different configurations of crossbars, etc.; in January 2002 I did an
“arrangement”, étude #13a, for this recording. I was thinking a (very) slow
blues when I was writing the piece, but it doesn’t sound bluesy at all.
Instead, I like the interaction of all the stopped, plucked, and harmonic
timbres.
#14 Martler.
I was at the VCCA with my wife Beth and had finished what I
came there to write, and there was still a week left in our residency. So I
simply started writing a piece loosely based on the rhythmic opening of Martin
Butler’s “Jazz Machines” (fast parallel fifths in the low register) — which
both Beth and I had been listening to during our lunch hours at VCCA. After writing
about 15 or 20 bars of music, I realized that I was writing a piece about hand
crossings. And in fact, it became the mother of all hand crossing pieces. The
hand-crossing becomes progressively more and more difficult until just before a
recapitulation, when the left hand plays in the middle register and the right
crosses over to the bottom of the piano. The piece is really as much about the
choreography of the hands as it is about the notes; the piece looks at least as good as it sounds.
#15 The Third, Man.
When it became clear that this collection of etudes was getting
pretty serious, I decided to put a little organization into the collection, and
resolved to write a bunch of them on intervals, as in the first book of Debussy
etudes. I started by writing an etude on thirds, since I liked this title. This
is one of the few slow, dreamy ones. It’s just one-part, then two-part, then
three-part counterpoint, all in thirds (both major and minor), and a little
near-quote from “Claire de Lune” at the end to close it off. The recapitulation
in this piece coincides with the completion of the bass’s descent to its low
note, C.
#16 Ice Boogie.
Was written for Steven Weigt, who planned a recital in May,
1998 and had resolved to perform a whole mess of etudes. This one is based
entirely on melodic octaves, in all sorts of rhythmic relationships to each
other, within a steady stream of eighth notes. It culminates in a gonzo boogie
woogie from hell at the climax. Most of the piece was written in the cold or by
candlelight, during the Ice Storm of the Century, which hit Maine as I started
it. The title is a nod to that storm.
#17 Keine Kaskadenjagd Mehr.
In June, 1998 I woke up on a particularly steamy and warm
morning with the sound image of descending high register piano, and decided
that this was a template for an etude on descending thirds and fourths. The
“waterfalls” of the opening brought to mind the TLC song, and the title is a
German version of “No more chasing waterfalls.” This etude strangely caught a
virus — octaves first infect the texture of running descending lines about
halfway into the piece, and then slowly take it over, until they get blown away
just before the recapitulation.
#18 Pitching From the Stretch.
I wrote this at the MacDowell Colony shortly after a bunch
of us did a field trip to Fenway Park to see Pedro Martinez beat his old team,
the Expos, 15-0. The “stretch” represents the hand position to play the tenths
in the piece, and there is nothing but them. It’s slow and unfolds under a
right hand rhythm of all quarters, giving the melody (such as it is) to the
left hand. The opening sonority is a C dominant 7th chocrd.
#19 Secondary Dominance.
This is a fun and very hard piece that starts off as an
obnoxious nose-thumbing at composers who use nothing but the octatonic scale.
It’s built over constantly shifting alternating patterns on seconds in mostly
the middle register. This one is painfully difficult because the main figures
come from alternating or repeated notes a second apart, combined in
non-patterned ways. I like that the ending gesture is a non sequitur, which
just seemed right.
#20 Fourth of Habit.
This is the last of six consecutive etudes built on
intervals, and was written for Geoffrey Burleson, who specifically requested
the fourth. Geoff is a great jazz improviser as well as a champion of new music
(including plenty of my etudes), so the swing eighths that the piece is built
on recognize Geoff’s background in jazz. It’s built on perfect fourths both in
harmonic piles and in lines, and several people independently have told me the
piece sounds “like McCoy Tyner on speed.” This one occasionally sticks in a
figure from the bridge of “Hot Pants,” which I had danced to several times at
the MacDowell Colony.
ÉTUDES BOOK III
#21 Twelve-Step Program.
After going a year without writing any piano etudes, and
with a semester leave coming up, I decided to challenge myself to write a whole
book of ten etudes in one year, along with the other pieces I had to write. I
started with Twelve-Step Program (which had the working title “Wedgie”). Earl
Kim had recently died, and I was a great admirer of his music; I remembered in
particular one very striking vocal chromatic “wedge” from an extended vocal
cadenza in Kim’s “Exercises en Route” and wondered if I could write a whole
piece based around such chromatic wedges. This fiercely difficult piece was
what came out. It starts with jerky-rhythmed wedges counterpointed against
other jerky-rhythmed wedges, and a gradual descent, followed by registrally
stratified wedges, all of it eventually smoothed out in a second large section
around running sixteenths accompanying very slow wedges. I particularly like
the way this ending evaporates just before the piece might have recapitulated.
#22 Schnozzage.
One of the most famous stories of Haydn and Mozart (or
Mozart and Haydn, or Haydn and Beethoven, depending on who tells the story) is
Mozart showing Haydn a piano sonata that ends on five-octave Cs, Haydn asking
how that can be played, and Mozart demonstrating by playing the middle one with
his nose. I also use my nose to demonstrate pedal point in the middle voice
when I teach tonal harmony: I play the bass and melody of the K. 331 sonata
with my hands, and the tenor voice (repeated Es) with my nose. It usually gets
the point across. I thought if a piece was going to be so egregiously silly as
to call for nose-playing, it should be serious instead of wink-wink funny, and
Schnozzage is what happened. It’s in a sort of solo-tutti-solo-tutti-solo form,
with the “tuttis” developing the nose melody contrapuntally. And a lot of
people have said this is the prettiest of the etudes. Not me, though.
#23 You Dirty Rag.
The idea for this began simply as an exercise in which
complicated figures in the left-hand would supply the backdrop for an etude in
which the left thumb often had the melody – thinking of Liszt etudes in this
case. I copped an upbeat beginning figure from Hayes Biggs’s Tagrango to get me going, and this
developed, sort of beyond my control, into ragtime-like figures. As such, it
also developed into an etude in which the speed of the two hands is quite
different: slow ragtime in the left hand and extremely fast, double-time
ragtime figures in the right, zipping over the entire range of the piano. I was
also thinking, metaphorically, of dance parties at Tanglewood where Ross Bauer
and I would do our regular white-guy lower-lip-biting dancing with Martin
Butler double-timing and zipping around us, with periods of silence while he
took a puff of a cigarette.
#24 Horned In.
The title is a pun on the name of David Horne, for whom it
was written. This one was fun and strange to write, as I restricted the piece
only to horn fifths, beginning one contrapuntal layer (on C) and eventually expanding
to four layers (I thought it was like what painting with jell-o must be like).
The harmony of the beginning reminds me of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, which I
tried to avoid, but didn’t. The ending returns to the beginning horn fifths in
C, backward, as if nothing had happened.
#25 Fists of Fury.
This one started as a not-too-private joke for Marilyn
Nonken. She had played an extremely challenging solo concert including
premieres of pieces by Jeff Nichols and Milton Babbitt, and included my first
two etudes to open the concert. Miller Theater, the presenter, decided to call
the concert “Fists of Fury,” a pretty silly name – and that name was slammed in
the New York Times review. As a consolation, I decided to write Marilyn a piece
with that title that actually does call for fists about a quarter of the time –
little black-note and white-note clusters, obviously. It starts and ends fast,
loud and furious, collapsing in the middle to the low register and an extended
quote from BAM!, my second etude. Near the beginning and end are also sequences
of longer notes that have to be “finger-pedaled,” that make the piece even
harder: a pedal on D near the beginning (finally “resolving” to C), and a quote
(in E-flat instead of D) from the beginning of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
(which I once had to play on trombone).
N.B. #26-#30 were
written at VCCA in January, 2000 in two weeks. As if that mattered.
#26 Once Bitten.
This is an etude on mordents precipitated by a composition
lesson in which I was telling a student that she was using so many mordent
figures that she was practically writing a mordent etude. She responded that I
was the etude guy, and that that was my job. So, here it is. It was the first piece
I wrote during a semester leave, and I was dazed and confused during its whole
composition, but it has ended up being my favorite, Amy’s favorite, and the
favorite of several other listeners. I started knowing I would do two things:
begin on a mordent on A, like the beginning of the Bach D minor Toccata; and
include a passage where the same mordent shifted its relative position within a
succession of chords so that different finger combinations would be required.
The rest I made up. Here the recapitulation happens over a repeated first
inversion E-flat major triad, and is followed by some impressionisting falling
scales in thirds, some of my favorite music in all the etudes.
#27 Halftone.
For a long time I thought about trying to write separate
white-note and black-note musics that could be played separately or together,
and Halftone was my attempt at doing such a strange thing. It was very hard to
write black-note and white-note music that didn’t resort to cliches that come
from so many such pieces, and harder still to make them work together. I solved
the problem with formal trickery: there is white-note music that starts high
and fast that descends and gets slower and black-note music that starts low and
slow and gets higher and faster. I thought the most dramatic part of the piece
would be when both musics are played together and they cross each other in
register. The black-note music may follow or precede the white-note music (in
the recording it is white-note music first), and the piece ends with both
musics played together.
#28 You’ve Got Scale.
I wrote this one at the suggestion of Teresa McCollough, who
had recorded etudes #2, #3, and #8, and who really liked wailing on “BAM!”, #2.
So this one is like BAM!, with relentless fast running sixteenth notes that
descend gradually from the bottom register at the outset. Plain old running
scales and arpeggios slowly mutate into chords that build up out of the
perpetual motion, after which the piece goes back to the bottom register where
it belongs.
#29 Roll Your Own.
Composer Jason Eckardt sent me half a dozen ideas for piano
etudes, including one for rolled chords. Since he suggested it would be called
“Roll Your Own,” I simply had to write it to have that title, and I dedicated
the piece to him. In this piece is a relentless sequence of rolled chords in
half notes (at half note M.M. 22-28) accompanying a melody that is restricted to
the middle register. The rolled chords get wider and wider until the rolled
chord becomes all eight C’s on the piano, which is heard nearly a dozen times.
A quick contraction in register to the opening rolled chords ends the piece.
#30 A Gliss is Just a Gliss.
I loved the white-note glissandos in Martin Butler’s piano
piece “On the Rocks,” and thought I might be able to steal them for an etude on
glissandi, but it turned out there was no way I could write a glissando that
was anywhere near as subtle as in that piece. Instead, I went all out and wrote
a raucous sort of atonal honky-tonk that shifts from register to register in
the coarsest and crassest way possible, with glissandi.
#31
USURPATION
In
1998, my colleague Marty Boykan wrote a collection of five little piano pieces
that he called Usurpations. In that
piece, he took various licks from pieces by his friends and colleagues, and
used them as the basis of piano miniatures. I was one of the composers so
usurped, with a chord from my song Psalm
of the Wind-Dweller becoming the basis of a very pretty piece. When Perspectives of New Music asked if I
would contribute an article or a piece for a festschrift for Marty’s 70th
birthday, I knew it was time to return the usurpation. Everyone who knows
Marty’s music knows that it is filled with slow trills, and for my usurpation,
I took two passages from Marty’s second piano sonata, quoted them literally,
and developed the persistent slow trills from those passages as I saw fit. The
harmonic and gestural language of the piece sounds closer to Marty’s music than
to my own, which just goes to show what a strong musical personality he has.
Composer talk
Marty’s
original slow trill is around D, so my piece is “in” D for that reason. As a
joke, the middle section’s slow trill is around A, the dominant, also locking
right in with Marty’s slow trill on A in the second quote. The 23rd
piano concerto of Mozart, slow movement, is quoted at the very end because we
both love that piece more than most.
#32
BOOGIE NINTHS
Was
part of the effort to write etudes on all the possible intervals. This one is a
swingy etude, and is really, really hard. The denizens of beer night
contributed the title. The harmonic language is different from most of the
etudes, though there are several jazz chords built with shifting notes inside
of pedal major ninths.
Composer talk
None,
except that I was obviously thinking of Stravinsky a lot, and a little bit of Ice Boogie.
#33
SLIDING SCALES
Is
a gonzo etude on scales. Any serious etude composer (normally a conflict in
terms) has to have an etude on scales, and this is a gonzo one that takes the
usual scale study and rips and twists it into all sorts of bizarre shapes until
it becomes largely a kind of funny parody of scale studies. Scales always move
very fast, but they also sometimes move at different speeds simultaneously,
sometimes slowly but within wide-ranging octave passages, and sometimes as part
of a passage with repeated notes embedded. This one must hurt a lot to play.
Composer talk
This
one is quite obviously “in” E. If there other ways to unfold scales, I didn’t
find them when I wrote this piece.
#34
CHORALE FANTASY
A
pun on Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. A little melody, first heard unadorned,
comes back harmonized, as middle voices in retrograde, inversion, and
retrograde inversion, and sometimes in combinations of two forms. I wrote this
one as a slow chorale so that I could have at least one etude in each book that
I could sort of play.
#35 Luceole.
Luceole was the first etude I wrote specifically for Amy,
and is the only etude on this CD that took longer than four days to write. I
got some unexpected academic year composing time when a trip I was to take was
cancelled due to weather, and I remember thinking about the texture of Keine
Kaskadenjagd Mehr (#17) with smaller intervals going up instead of down, and in
jerky rhythms. So I ran with those figures for a while, thinking I was possibly
writing little puffs of smoke going up and evaporating. After a couple of days
of work, I had to put the piece down for about three months, after which I
returned to it while at the MacDowell Colony and not having much success
writing a horn concerto. While walking to my studio one evening I passed a
field full of fireflies, and remembered a much denser field of fireflies in
Rome just below my studio there; perhaps I wasn’t writing musical puffs of
smoke, but musical fireflies. Once I had that image in mind, I knew that the
piece should ultimately end high with shimmering tremolos, the coarsest musical
analog I could think of to that field of fireflies. “Luceole” is the Italian
word for fireflies.
#36 Purple.
When I asked Amy for ideas for piano etudes for her, she
suggested an etude on her favorite chord: the right hand position of a sharp-9
chord, for instance E-B-flat-E-flat, reading up. Since this is essentially the
chord that starts “Purple Haze,” I called this piece “Purple” and riffed on
this chord in as many ways as I could think. This is the only etude with metric
modulations in it, having a middle section in the tempo of triplets to the
sixteenth notes of the outer sections. The middle section also quotes “Fourth
of Habit,” one of the first etudes that Amy had played. Amy is also a part-time
jazz pianist, and I was impressed that she could play the changes to the break
in “Night in Tunisia” the first time I met her. As a nod to that, I hid a brief
quote from that tune in the piece. It, too, was written at the MacDowell Colony
instead of a horn concerto.
#37 TAKING THE FIFTHS
I got this title from my wife after one of our many
brainstorming sessions for clever etude titles. Perfect fifths were not
specifically taboo for us in graduate school, but using lots of them was
obviously shunned because of the strong tonal associations, plus the fact that
lots of fifths had become kind of an “American” cliche. This one is fast-slow-fast,
based around a neighbor figure (stated in parallel fifths, of course) that
bears some similarity to the opening vocal line in Stravinsky’s Renard. I also tried to get in a great
chord that I love from an Ives song (F#-C#-G# in the left hand, A-E-B in the
right, I think the song is called Tom
Sails Away), but I only managed to get the left hand portion in,
accompanying a C major triad in the left hand.
Composer talk
The first inversion D major triad is the referential
sonority for this one, and the alternating fifths motive that guides this piece
probably came from the first sung music of Stravinsky’s Renard.
#38 SILENT BUT DEADLY
This title came from Amy Dissanayake after I told her I was
thinking of writing an etude of loud music that has to be played softly. She
also mentioned that it had the same initials as her husband Shehan, and the
etude is dedicated to him. I don’t remember much about this piece, except that
it was really hard to write, and has a funny thing in it around a D major triad
with G# added.
Composer talk
This one is hard to like, but I like it more the more I hear
it. The form comes from very subtle harmonic alternations between the opening
and the D majorish sonority of bar 4. I think if it had a wide range of
dynamics it would be just another slushy romantic atonal piece.
#39 SIXTH APPEAL
The flowing passage of the beginning, all in sixths, was a
figure that had been in the back of my head for a long time, and I was glad
finally to get to put it in a piece. It seems to me that the prettiness and
sadness of this piece comes from the rather quick and unpredictable alternation
of an apparent minor mode together with notes that don’t belong. I was, of
course, thinking of Brahms when writing parallel sixths – who wouldn’t? – and I
was originally thinking of the flowing stuff in sixths turning into an
accompaniment to a melody in sixths that would emerge from the texture. But I
ended up with a better idea: the melody, such as it is, is always stuck on just
two notes, C# and A# (a sixth apart), never developing, just fading in and out
at various intervals and in various registers. An audience (and performer)
favorite seems to be when that sixth is heard in the bottom register of the
piano.
Composer talk
Just like late Brahms has to cadence in every register for a
true completion, I had to use the motive in every register. The recap is also
concurrent with the motive’s appearance in the lowest register. And this one is
an audience favorite, and my favorite from Book IV.
#40 STRIDENT
For at least a year, Amy Dissanayake had strongly suggested
I write a stride piano etude for her to play. I only had a vague notion of what
stride piano was, and I was a little wary about extending the idea of writing
an etude from a technical problem to a style imitation. Nonetheless, I savored
the challenge of jumping into an unfamiliar style and trying to make it my own.
To figure out just what stride piano is, I found stridepiano.com on the web,
which is almost drooly in its veneration of James P. Johnson (who also wrote
the Charleston) and Fats Waller, so I got CDs of both of them playing. What I
found out is that stride is like ragtime (oompah in the left hand, sort of,
with fast stuff in the right hand), except that it swings, and the bass line is
a little more melodic than ragtime. The James P. Johnson tune that gave me the
most to chew on was one called Jingles,
recorded in the 1920s. This piece is structured a little like a traditional
ragtime or march, having two repeated sections followed by a trio, which is
also repeated, and a substantial coda.
Composer talk
Much functional harmony is suggested without being acted
upon, especially the dominant seventh upbeat to the Trio, and the quasi V-I
cadence in Bflat of the ending.
#41 BOP IT
I told you style imitation for an etude was dangerous. When
Geoffrey Burleson found out that I was writing a stride étude (by virtue of the
fact that I sent him a copy), he asked me to write him a “piano bop” etude. For ideas, he sent me recordings of Bud
Powell, Chick Corea, and himself improvising bop. Basically, piano bop is
described as stabbing left-hand chords and amazingly technical stuff in the
right hand that is too fast to swing. This piece is in two parts, both of them
starting with a “head” – a syncopated chorale, if you will – followed by
passages that riff over the harmony chorale in a bop way. The second head ends
with a near-quote from Coltrane’s Giant
Steps.
Composer talk
This one is “in” A, and for the first time I was conscious
of trying to write an imitative contrapuntal passage as the way to lead to a
recapitulation. The ending notes remember E-Machines,
BAM!, and Fists of Fury. Only different.
#42 MADAM I’M ADAM
This is another of many ideas that had rattled around in the
closet of my head for a while that I used this etude to flesh out – trying to
make a piece using only phrases that were palindromes (the same notes forwards
and backwards). The opening pair of phrases had lingered for some time in my
mind. The piece itself is a big palindrome (the middle of it is very evident),
and contains within it plenty of overlapping palindromes. The second half adds
other simple palindromes on top of the larger palindrome of the whole piece,
because that’s just what I do.
#43 WIGGLE ROOM
This one was Amy’s idea – an etude on fast notes moving more
or less in parallel modeled on the texture of the C minor prelude from the
first book of the Well-Tempered Klavier. Here I just kept the notes going fast
and the gestures continually changing in relation to each other. Since it’s
based on a Bach piece, then the dynamics, articulations and pedalings are left
up to the performer.
Composer talk
There are recapitulative episodes galore – m. 36, 60, and 68
to be exact, just as one often gets in Bach’s texture pieces.
#44 TRIADDLED
Simply a bitonal etude that is shaped like a fantasia – i.e.
anything goes, at any time. I don’t use triads a lot in my longer pieces, so I
liked the challenge of using only triads. The passages of arpeggiated triads
are consciously hyperextended versions of the rising triad figures in Appalachian Spring. When I’m listening
to it, at bar 51 I always think or say, “meanwhile, in Brazil…”
#45 PINK TAB
This is an etude on phrases that speed up and slow down,
rather obviously modeled on the music for the Countess Geschwitz in Berg’s
opera Lulu, for whom speeding up and
slowing down is a leitmotif. The accelerando-ritenuto phrases are of differing
lengths and speeds, and sometimes overlap into as many as four parts. So this
one was a big technical challenge compositionally. The title Pink Tab is actually nonsense. More than
fifteen years ago, when my friend Ross Bauer was writing a large ensemble
piece, I dreamed about its premiere, at which it was entitled Pink Tab. Ross thought that was so funny
that he told his editor (Bruce) he was submitting a piece called that, and the
editor was unamused. Therefore, I used it instead. Some people have inferred a
drug reference from the title, which would be incorrect. Though both dream and
drug begin with “dr”, my initials. Whoa.
#46 DURCHRAUSCHT DIE LUFT
With #46 and #47 I finally screwed in the courage to finish
with all the intervals – I had written etudes on every interval except sevenths
and tritones, and here is where I started that. To make sevenths prettier than
the usual mod-music clichés, I imagined them accompanying a bird in flight,
which reminded me of the 13th Liebeslieder Waltz of Brahms, which is about a
bird darting through the air (the title means darting through the air). I tried
to keep it as light as possible, beginning and ending at the top of the piano.
Composer talk
This one is in A-Gsharp, sort of. The L.H. parallel sevenths
of 50-51 and 54-end were a good idea.
#47 FRA DIABOLIS
There is no more overused and clichéed interval for mod
music than the tritone, and I was unable to resist the impulse to begin and end
only with naked tritones. In the middle, though, that same sequence of tritones
heard at the opening keeps coming back embedded within more complex chords with
other intervals. A recurring character is the lowest two B’s on the piano
together with the highest two F’s that always interrupt (like someone blurting
out “STOP!” at a party or in a rehearsal), until at the end the tritone
resolves outward by half step. It could have resolved inward, but that would be
a different piece.
Composer talk
Accordingly, the piece is “in” B-F, which is unfolded in
several registers at the end – making it a very long coda, I think. In this
piece there are a lot of instances where it is supposed to feel as if the
opening is trying to return, always frustrated, until the coda.
#48 WHAT HALF-DIMINISHES ONE (half-diminishes all)
Martin Butler had played me a piano chorale of his over the
phone, and this chorale used nothing but major seventh chords in various
inversions. I wanted to write one of those chorales on only one kind of chord,
and I chose the late 19th century’s favorite chord, the half-diminished seventh
chord. There are nothing but half-diminished seventh chords in this very slow piece,
except for a few passing tones, suspensions, and arpeggiations. Writing a piano
chorale brought to mind Schumann’s Der
Dichter Spricht from the Album for the Young, so the opening melody of my
piece uses the same three notes as Schumann. The piece is dedicated to my
colleague Eric Chafe, who has an office with a clunky piano next to mine, who
teaches a graduate course in late Romantic music, and who has a nasty habit of
meeting with students in his office to demonstrate all the resolutions of half-diminished
seventh chords found in Wagner operas and Wolf songs. I’m not sure, but I think
the first phrase in the low register may inadverently quote something in
Schönberg’s Gurrelieder.
Composer talk
Gsharp half diminished is the referential sonority for the
piece, as is readily apparent.
#49 SALTIMMANO
A finger pedaling etude. Bach is full of finger pedaling –
when a long line is sustained without the use of pedal, around staccato and
detailed figuration. This one was really
hard to write. It’s got a long line surrounded by jumpy, jittery atonal
figuration and a surprise chorale in the middle that emerges as the
contrapuntal lines slow down. The title means jumps in hand, a pun on the
famous Italian dish saltimbocca, which means jumps in your mouth.
Amy played this on a Berio tribute concert in Chicago (I
represented “former student of Berio”) along with the piano sequenza, and only
then did I recognize a gestural similarity with Berio.
#50 NO STRANGER TO OUR PLANET
Once Hayes Biggs had written in the liner notes for Amy
Dissanayake’s first disc of etudes that every etude of mine ending in zero used
“swing eighths,” I was bound to writing this one in swing eighths. The idea
here is of short ideas that get interrupted by the hands shifting registers to
other ideas frequently – a register shifting etude. Amy says this one is
actually very cool. The fun for me in this one was occasionally thwarting the
swing eighths by interpolating sixteenth note runs that would temporarily
destroy the pulse. At the end, since it ends Book V, the tritone of Fra Diabolis returns, this time
resolving inward. The title is an old, old running gag I have had with friends
– some of the moves in this piece seemed like they came from another planet, so
I used the old running gag for the title.
Composer talk
Here the swing eighths are occasionally undermined by other
rhythmic divisions – a rhythmic idea I wish to pursue more fully in future
pieces. The undermining of the rhythm in this fashion together with a registral
descent and diminuendo in mm. 47-48 are supposed to be funny – and to remind
one of the way Milton Babbitt talks to the very end of his breaths, often
ending sentences in a muttering way.
#51 ZIPPER TANGO
This is a tango, loosely speaking, that is also an étude on
grace notes, written for Amy’s tango project. The more sultry tangos I heard on
my CDs of tangos often had a double grace note figure lending special heaviness
to the bass, and this tango uses that a lot; Rick Moody said that on the MIDI
realization of the piece, those notes sounded like zippers, hence the name. In
listening to about three dozen tangos, I got a sense that there was a slow,
sultry tango, and a faster, more headlong march-like tango. I used both of them
in this piece: the slow, sultry one in the outer sections, and the fast one in
the middle, which I get in and out of via metric modulations.
#52 MOODY’S BLUES
This one came about as a suggestion, practically a
challenge, from the writer Rick Moody. He had been watching a camcorder movie
of Amy playing Strident, and brought
in Derrida (a quote about mixing genres), and said it was a very interesting
mix of real stride and Davy’s own brand of modernism. Probably because of Amy’s
strong pianism, and how outrageously well she brought off the glissando étude
in her New York concert, he mentioned that a Jerry Lee Lewis type of étude
would be something that would be well-suited for Amy, and she would bring it
off marvelously. He then brought in Derrida again. The suggestion was so
outrageous that I couldn’t resist trying it, and naturally it came about via an
étude in right hand repeated chords. I thought of it as a typical modernist
piece that slowly discovers that there is old-time rock and roll imminent in
the gestures, and the opening chord – sort of the modernist tonic chord, if you
will – eventually gets changed, by changing one note, into the chord that Jerry
Lee Lewis would pound at if his blues were in C. I knew Aaron Kernis has also
written a Jerry Lee Lewis piece (Superstar
Etude #1), but I hadn’t heard it. Any similarities are accidental, or to be
expected given the premise. The music from m. 77 to m. 86 is a faux blues
progression, either by accident or on purpose.
#53 CELL DIVISION
I was listening to recordings of the New England String Ensemble
in preparation for writing a large piece for them, and didn’t feel I had enough
ideas to start working on the piece just yet. When I turned on my cell phone
and it played its customary rising arpeggios on C major 7, I figured that was a
ripe figure for an étude. Because the notes on the cell phone are so high, I
kept the entire étude in the top half of the piano – the lowest note being the
G below middle C. The piece begins with the turning-on sound, the make call
sound (3 notes), and ends with the turning-off sound (the same arpeggios going
down) and the end call sound (the make call sound backwards). The gestures are
then chromatically transformed in the usual way, and overlapped. A few passages
in broken octaves together spell the opening chord, in the original order.
#54 PEDAL TO THE METAL
After I finished my string symphony at Yaddo, I still had
four weeks left in my residency, a time which I used to write six etudes. This
one, and its title, were suggested by the writer Rick Moody – a piece in which
all three pedals are used a lot, and specifically. Rick also said the piece
should quote the 39 Lashes music of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is does,
three times. It has a two-part structure, with the first dominated by the soft
pedal and the second by the sostenuto pedal.
#55 EIGHT MISBEHAVIN’
…is a wedding present to Rick Moody and Amy Osborn. It was
composed on the day of their wedding, and was designed to be simple enough for
Amy to perform (and for me). The opening comes from the slow movement of the
E-flat major clarinet sonata of Brahms (Op. 120 Nr. 1), and the rhetoric of the
whole piece from that opening gesture.
#56 CRAZY EIGHTS
I wrote the piece because I liked the title. The premise is
that it is all octaves, and each hand restricted to only the black keys or
white keys – and it’s crazy-ass fast. To begin, the right hand has white keys
and the left has black keys, and the hand distributions shift at the climax of
the piece. The recapitulation is the same shape, rhythm and register as the
opening, except with the hand assignments reversed. In performance it sounds a
little like a conversation between two crazy people (high register, low
register) that gets a little heated, and one of them mumbles and walks away.
#57 CHORD SHARK
One of two I wrote for Corey Hamm for a competition. This
was his suggestion, a “cool chord” etude “like the C minor prelude of Chopin”.
I based mine on the Op. 116 #6 of Brahms, using some of those funny dissonant
chords as building blocks for my piece. One of the challenges was to reuse the
opening chord as a cadential chord, and as a middle-of-phrase chord. Hard to do
in this crazy chromatic context.
#58 WOUND TIGHT
Is the fast version of a “cool chord” etude, also for Corey
Hamm. For most of the piece, very quickly moving chords rule, with the hands
moving in absolute rhythmic unison, occasionally stopped by a brief slow chord
passage. It could possibly sound like constipated be-bop. It also sounds like
an animated conversation between two crazy people who stop listening to each
other and scream a little bit.
#59 ZECCATELLA
This one is for Amy Dissanayake, based on her suggestion for
a staccato-legato etude – something legato surrounded by staccato figuration.
First the tune is in triple octaves, with the top voice legato and the bottom
staccato; then the bass becomes more like a bass line. The staccato figuration
at first made me think of a seasick samba, but I got over it. Eventually, a
figure in 32nd notes first heard in bar 14 takes over, and the piece becomes
more of a whirling dervish kind of thing. I got bitten by a tick while writing
this piece, so Geoff Burleson suggested the title be a variation on a
Tarantella – instead of a dance caused by a tarantula bite, this would be a
dance caused by a tick bite. “Zecca” is the Italian word for tick.
#60 ACCENTS OF MALICE
This being an etude whose number ends in zero, it was
incumbent upon me yet again to write one using swing eighths. But I also wanted
it to be the last one where that was the rule, so after the swingy rhythm is
set up and acted on, some of the bars blast right through the perceived pulse
until towards the end there is neither pulse nor swing – this happened a bit in
No Stranger to Our Planet, but is
more fully developed here; indeed, those fast notes breaking through the swing
feel like they’re trying to escape a rigid rhythmic structure, and eventually
they do. As an “accent” etude, this one usually puts them on the weak part of
the swing rhythm, and should be played as any good jazzer would play them, and
then the accents get put in some pretty hard places once the swing eighths have
gone away. This was written while I had a particularly intense summer cold, so
some of the sudden flurries of accents represent the coughing jags I was
getting.
Composer talk The beginning music returns in m. 53 over a
long line.
#61 MENAGE À DROIT
Amy was out with tendonitis in her left hand for a while, so
I wrote this little piece for right hand only to cheer her up. I don’t know if
I ever planned for it to be performed. The title came from Rick Moody. In the
piece, Some fast figuration in the upper register in small notes (meant to look
like a Chopin prelude) morphs into swing, gets lower, and morphs back. In the
middle, a pedal D is held and repeated, thanks to the Sostenuto pedal. The move
from D to C signifies the beginning of the transition back to the beginning
music, and recalls a similar finger-pedaled D pedal moving to C from Fists of Fury.
#62 NAME THAT TURN
Bears the distinction of there being the longest delay
between finishing the piece and naming it. The name came from Hillary Zipper at
the Cambridge Common over brunch about a week and a half after I finished it.
The idea came when I heard some Haydn songs at a student recital at Brandeis,
and a lot of phrases in the piano had turns at the incipit. I wondered what a
piece with a LOT of turns would sound like, and so it was up to me to write it
and find out. Halfway through there are a couple of fugatos in the good
Hindemith manner, and an extra layer of difficulty is added near the end as
fast broken octaves are added on top of the turns—a Davy specialty.
#63 KILLER B’S
Here I was asking myself the rhetorical question – in a
chromatic idiom with fast-moving harmony such as I write, could I sustain a
piece that had a pedal note in it? My strategy for sustaining the pedal note
was simply to have it repeat in quarter notes, and frequently shift the “beat”
to a dotted eighth and back – to keep the rhythm off balance. At the halfway
mark, the repeated B starts slow, then speeds up, in a veiled tribute to the
B’52s’s tune “Rock Lobster”.
Composer talk once
the pedal B gets put into broken octaves going methodically up and down the
keyboard, I made it a strategy to use all the B’s except the lowest, until the
recapitulative coda. So several times the B’s seem to go to the lowest
register, only to land on C, and finally resolve to B, Phrygian-like (or even
Locrian-like) for the recap.
#64 A THIRD IN THE HAND
A very simple piece on arpeggiated (“melodic”) thirds. – yet
another “thirds” etude, like The Third,
Man and Twilight. They go up, and
they go down, I like the slowly shifting perceived chord progressions, and
there is a registral shape, and then it ends. For the ending, an octave is
repeated in the right hand filled in with alternating major and minor thirds,
and the ending sonority is the not-so-surprising G-sharp minor.
#65 RICK’S MOOD
Yet another etude prompted by a suggestion from Rick Moody –
but this one was a double competition. In fall 2002, while I was on sabbatical
and writing Book 5, he challenged me to write a piece using only major triads,
and I challenged him to write a rhyming poem. My first version was written in
two and a half days – it was harder to write than I thought – and premiered by
Amy as an encore at Brandeis in March, 2003. I didn’t make the piece an étude
at first, since it was just a silly bet. When Rick asked me why it wasn’t an
étude, the only answer I had was that it wasn’t long enough. Twice, in 2004 and
2005, I returned to it and added phrases, lengthened existing phrases, and
rewrote a few phrases, finally inserting in into Book 7 in time to be #65.
Rick’s rhyming poem, by the way, was about spoonerisms, and near as I can
figure, he never tried to publish it.
Composer talk the
incipit returns as the middle of a phrase – stupid composer tricks.
#66 LESS IS
This one was also Rick Moody’s idea. He mused about what I
would sound like if I were a Glass-like minimalist – using dissonant chords
“and shit” instead of consonant ones, and moving faster harmonically. I had
just finished writing the last of my Sex
Songs, this one on a text by Rick, so I copped an upward-moving arpeggio
from that song as the main material. Not a normal arpeggio, but more like a
chord that builds from the bottom up, one note at a time, with the arpeggio as
the perceived melody. That became the normal gesture for this piece, along with
a repeated E and the gesture’s inversion. At the climax to the piece, both
upward and downward-building gestures happen, and the chords are certainly
dissonant.
The title actually came from Amy. Because all the ones Rick
and I came up with, bitch, bitch, sucked.
#67 AIN’T GOT NO RIGHT
Corey Hamm (for whom Chord
Shark and Wound Tight had been
written) e-mailed me to say that he had tendonitis in his right hand and that
he’d be pleased to work on or premiere any left-hand music I had. I already had
two right-hand études, but no left-hand étude, so I told him I couldn’t help.
But this was close to my February vacation, and after thinking about it a
little, I couldn’t not write it. A bouncy but terse syncopated opening gives
way to a more flowing middle section, which transits back to the opening music,
and it climaxes in a passage that moves from register to register quite
quickly.
This one got hot and heavy in the title sweepstakes, as
detailed elsewhere, and besides Left Out
to Dry and Sinister Motives,
pressure was heavy to call it Gauche Busters. But as I passed Rossini’s
restaurant in Concord, Mass., on my drive home from work, the title came to me.
#68 ABSOFUNKINLUTELY
The title is the politer version of the last line spoken by Big in the last episode of Sex in the
City – also the last line of the first episode. It was July, I had finally
been relieved of my very stressful music department Chairmanship, I had a piano
trio to write, but I wasn’t feeling like writing piano trio music. So I turned
to Rick Moody yet again for suggestions, who suggested a piece based on “Tower
of Power licks”. Since such licks would likely be under copyright, I went
instead for some generic licks you find in many funk tunes – two licks in
particular (the lick that starts the second repeated section, and the
upward-rising quasi arpeggio figure and syncopates over the beat). The first two
short sections are repeated, and they’re all over the keyboard. The middle,
long section, is a long build-up marked “Dirty (The Not Chairman Dances)”
climaxes on a couple of wide repeated chords, and then a coda relaxes,
including a figure that can be repeated 3 to 7 times. Finally at the end, the
upward rising figure becomes a downward, figure and is sequenced.
Adam Marks picked up this piece and premiered it in New
York, later taking it to the Concours International de Piano d’Orléans in 2006,
which includes a Chevillion-Bonnaud Prize for the best new piano work played in
the first round. Incredibly, it won that prize, but Adam didn’t move beyond the
second round of the competition. So I got 4600 Euros, and Adam got diddly.
#69 PALM DE TERRE
Composed at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and
the title came from Beff. A slow and dreamy kind of étude, where I tried to
make soft, pretty clusters and not the vicious poundy ones so often associated
with clusters. Not a complicated piece, sounds a little like Ives in places.
#70 STUTTER STAB
A sort of companion piece to Wound Tight in that it’s a fast cool chords piece, but with the
dynamics changing very, very fast. Here the rhythm owes a lot to bebop, as do a
lot of the chords. In the middle of the piece the chords slow down and get
sustained while a line in the middle of the texture emerges and disappears. And
yes, also written at the VCCA, and the title came from Beff – a variation on
“stutter step”, denoting the egregious rhythmic irregularity.
#71 CHASE
This was requested by Don Berman, and actually commissioned
out of a grant from the Argosy Foundation. Don asked for an étude with an
optional celesta part, and I was happy to comply. Here there is a flurry of
arpeggiations in sixteenth notes that support a slow melody, occasionally
interrupted by an upward-rising chorale in the piano only. The “Chase” of the
piece denotes the arpeggiative sixteenth notes shared by the piano and celesta
in unison occasionally going out of phase by one note, and catching back up.
#72 DORIAN BLUE
Another one for Don Berman, on a Dorian melody. The étude makes three passes through the tune,
which is in the Dorian (or more specifically, HypoDorian) mode. To make it an
étude, rapid two-hand flourishes are added, which become much more pervasive in
the last pass. In the first pass, harmony is fairly diatonic and modal. In the
second pass, chords moving chromatically and parallel become gradually thicker.
In the last pass, all the registers of the piano are active, especially the
deep bass.
#73 HEAVY HITTER
After I finished all of my summer writing, I still had five days
left at Yaddo, so I asked around for étude ideas. Mike Kirkendoll, for whom I
had just finished Gli Uccelli di
Bogliasco, suggested a “heavy” étude – an idea I liked as a counterweight
to Silent But Deadly, my pianissimo
étude. I had also just finished a big piano concerto, which has a giant composed
cadenza, with the indication that the performer can write his/her own, or
improvise one on the spot. Just in case my composed cadenza never actually got
played, I used its incipit as the incipit of Heavy Hitter. Most of the piece is quite athletic, with a motive of
repeated chords in which an inner voice moves chromatically. At the two-thirds
mark, a broken octave figure becomes the incipit of the final section leading
to a quasi-recapitulation. Mike premiered the piece in New York on a piano that
seemed to have at least one broken string; he was so forceful it’s a miracle he
didn’t just chop the piano in half.
#74 NOT
Adam Marks did a dissertation at NYU on piano pieces
that call for the performer also to speak. To wit, he suggested that I should
write him a “talking pianist” étude, an idea I dismissed out of hand. But since
it represented the kind of weird challenge that eats at my brain, I started
looking around for texts that were appropriate for a pianist to say while
playing. I asked Rick Moody for some ideas, but ultimately none of them bore
fruit.
Later, while looking on my computer in my folder of word
processing files, I discovered a minimalist poem by Rick called Not that simply and slowly constructs
the phrase “Not happy with it, not lying down for it” by combining its words
into many different fragments and eventually “discovering” the underlying text.
I asked Rick for permission to use it, and he said he’d been hoping I’d use it
some day (I guess he had sent it to me in 2002 and I forgot about it). I abridged it
somewhat, and wrote the piece as a kind of absurdist monodrama over a piano
part that is by turns agitated and serene. This étude is by far the longest one
(23 pages, 7-1/2 minutes), and Adam premiered it in Paris in the Salle Cortot
on a recital sponsored by the Orléans piano competition.
#75 TWILIGHT
Another étude on thirds which I wrote in a few days I had
between finishing the school semester and flying to Europe for a vacation. I
was thinking specifically of the accompaniment figures in “Zwielicht” in
Schumann’s Op. 39 Liederkreis – which a student had just orchestrated in my
Orchestration class. In my piece the opening sequence of thirds is repeated
many times, both literally and in augmentation, which the surface speed occasionally
speeds way up and the bass makes a welcome appearance. In the ending, there are
a few actual brief quotes from the Schumann song.
#76 CLAVE
Geoffrey Burleson suggested an étude on the “clave” rhythm,
which underpins nearly all commercial Latin music. He wanted to play it in
recital at his school, which has a strong commercial music program and a lot of
Latin musicians. My approach to the first part of the piece was a kind of
Nancarrow thing – to present the clave rhythm in several different simultaneous
tempi that gradually get faster until the actual pulse of the piece is heard.
At the halfway point, several simultaneous out-of-phase claves give the
impression of a jerky arpeggiation, and that eventually evolves into a bebop
solo accompanied by left-hand music on the clave rhythm (a reference to Bop It, also written for Geoff). At the
end, the slow claves return.
#77 ECCO ECO
For my April 2007 school vacation, Corey Hamm suggested an
“echo” etude, possibly thinking of the old Baroque echo sonatas wherein phrases
were repeated immediately by contrasting groups of instruments. He also
suggeested that the echoes could encroach on each other and destroy or shatter
each other. In this piece, the echoes are usually simple events that repeat at
various intervals, each time softer, as if played through a delay box. But in Ecco Eco, the time of delay keeps
changing, and new material is often added before the echo of old material
fades. Hence, this is an extremely difficult one because of the rapidly shifting
dynamics and the many layers that are happening simultaneously – not to
mention, the period of delay varies from four eighth notes all the way down to
three sixteenths (as at the end).
#78 UPON REFLECTION
Also during my April vacation, Mike Kirkendoll suggested
mirror etudes, and this is the first of two. This is a slow one (I always like
to have one etude in each book that I can play, and this is the one for Book 8)
where the left and right hands are exact mirrors – all that changes is the
fulcrum of reflection, twice.
#79 NARCISSITUDE
This is a fast
mirror étude, and also a mirror canon – for most of the piece, the left hand
plays the inversion of the right hand, usually one sixteenth note later. The
usual fulcrum of reflection is the C# and D of the beginning of the piece, but
that fulcrum shifts a few times. Toward the end, the hand relationship shifts,
and the right hand follows the left by one sixteenth. The ending gesture calls
for the hands to cross by about as much as they can, until the player looks
straitjacketed.
#80 FIREWORKS
I had prepared to lecture on Debussy’s 24th étude Feux d’artifice for my second year
theory class after mistakenly downloading the score from an online sheet music
archive – it was intriguing to look at and to hear, and was so provocative and
simple that I resolved to write an étude inspired by it. After I finished my
big project for 2007 (a wind ensemble piece), I wrote it while in the Stone
Tower at Yaddo. Like Debussy’s, mine begins quiet, gets loud, and gets quiet
again. With mine, a two-beat arpeggio pattern supports half-step rocking
melodies in the middle voices that occasionally get more excited and bubble
into much faster note patterns, perhaps signifying fireworks that interrupt
idle waiting-around time. As with the usual fireworks shows, the first bursts
are small ones, they get closer together and there’s one big show, followed by
one little one, perhaps the leftovers. And that’s the shape of my Fireworks.
#81 KAI’N VARIATION
In the fall of 2007, I (and plenty of other composers) were
approached by Kai Schumacher, a pianist in Amsterdam finishing a piano
performance program, to write variations on a tune of his, to be collected into
a single big variations set. The variations set would be on his final recital
and would share it with Rzewski’s “People United” set. The theme is a fairly
straightforward cocktail-piano type tune in D minor with a chromatically
falling bass and a deceptive ending. My variation was long enough (a minute and
a half) and complex enough that I felt comfortable calling it an étude “on
diatonic scale fragments” – the opening D minor scale of Kai’s tune is the
incipit of my variation, which turns into perpetual motion Bach-style writing.
The harmonies of the original tune do appear in succession, with lots of
passing and scale materials in between.
#82 F THIS
Shortly after Marilyn Nonken’s performance of my piano
concerto, she e-mailed to ask if I knew any piano pieces on only one note. A
student of hers, possibly looking for an extremely easy paper topic, had asked.
I forwarded the question to Ken Ueno, who said there were a few pieces that use
one pitch class in lots of different octaves, but none he could think of that
used only one – and he added at the end, “sounds like a Davytude”. After I told
him I didn’t go there, he responded, “sounds like a buttstick!”. So after the
idea ate away a part of my brain, I started the piece as soon as my winter
vacation started. The idea of the piece was to make it sound fast, use lots of
dynamic and color differentiation (including plucked and stopped notes, and
resonance caused by some notes held down with the sostenuto pedal), and move
rapidly from pulse to pulse via metric modulations. I dedicated the piece both
to Marilyn and Ken, and Marilyn premiered it as an encore at NYU in Feburary of
2008.
#83 M’AIDEZ
Nathanael May – who premiered Gli Uccelli di Bogliasco — asked for an étude for himself along a
pretty amorphous premise: he wanted undulating low register stuff that would
occasionally be broken into by upward rising arpeggios, such as he played many
of in Gli Uccelli. After a false
start on this piece in my February vacation, I returned in my April vacation,
and reinterpreted that “undulating” figure as a fast, syncopated figure that
tended to descend, alternating with a fortissimo incipit in octaves.
Nathanael’s arpeggios then break the sort of obnoxiousness of that texture, and
eventually become developed in their own right. At the end, the octave idea,
previously interruptive, takes over. The title is a pun on Nathanael’s last
name – “May Day”, a universal navigational cry for help, retranslated to the
original French.
#84 WHAT’S HAIRPINNING
For some reason in the several days remaining of my April
vacation – and despite the unseasonably gorgeous weather – I got the sound of
crescendo-diminuendo repeated notes in my brain and wondered just how much I
could slow down my compositional metabolism in an étude based on that figure.
And the answer was – quite a lot, but hardly at all compared to a lot of
composers. My étude takes almost a minute and a half to change the chord (an
“accomplishment”, scare quotes and all), but then adds complications pretty
quickly, mostly a descending chromatic figure. The other complications are
simple polyrhythms, or pulses of different duration, and of course the fact
that each hand is frequently called on to perform independent dynamic swells in
two voices. I like the goofiness of the title.
#85 DIMINISHING RETURN
I arrived at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy for a
six-week residency in mid-June, having had no writing time yet in the summer of
2008, and was on deadline to write a piece for Merkin Hall responding to jazz.
When I finally had that seemingly unlimited time, I had no ideas for that
piece, so I turned instead to an etude, one related to #84, and which had been
prompted by #84 – another etude on individual dynamics, this time on fading
fast repeated notes. The bunches of notes that get repeated vary in length, of
course, and center around D (the opening gambit of D’s followed by B’s in the
other hand is the same as the opening gambit of Pink Tab). A few syncopated non-repeated note lines emerge, but
vanish just as quickly. The final sonority of C-sharp, D and E is the same
pitch classes as the ending of #84.
#86 PROG SPRINGS ETERNAL
I often have asked Rick Moody for etude ideas, and he’s come
up with some pretty good ones. I asked him again in the summer of 2007 when I
was at Yaddo struggling with Phillis Levin Songs. His suggestion was to do a
prog-rock etude – by now he knew I liked weird challenges, even ones I don’t
understand. I asked him what sort of things he’d expect in such an etude, and
he said he had no idea. Instead, he sent me a CD of a bunch of prog-rock tunes
and said maybe I could sort it out that way. The stuff he sent ranged from
complicated free jazz to pretentious stadium rock, so I had no idea exactly
where to go.
A year later, when Geoff Burleson was staying at my house
for a gig, I brought up this quandary. It turns out Geoff had a big prog rock
phase in the 70s, and he was able to be a bit more specific, to wit: block
structures; virtuosity for its own sake; sus4 chords; faux modality; and fake
counterpoint. With that in hand, I was able to write the piece in three working
days, during a strange block of twelve straight days I had off from teaching
due to the Jewish holidays. When Geoff premiered it (in Canada!) he also noted,
among other things, that the right hand figuration in bars 59-61 were faux
Baroque, perfectly appropriate for the style.
#87 BERCEUSE
After all the etude fodder Rick Moody had given me, it was
entirely appropriate that when he became an expectant father that I dedicate an
etude to the impending offspring (precedent was Judy Bettina and Jim
Goldsworthy’s daughter Arianna (now in college), to whom I dedicated Musician back in 1990). I thought it
should be simple enough for Rick or his wife Amy to play (and for me), and also
fit within the range of a typical toy piano. So for an idea, I turned to the
Stravinsky Five Fingers – much of which I learned in high school – and the
tradition (if there is one) of five-finger piano pieces. Mine, of course, has
different five-finger positions in each hand, and they shift – thus my
including them when they shift in the score to the piece.
This was also written in that twelve-day window of free
time, and was written in one day. Further, it was entered into Finale, and that
same day, Geoff played through it on a toy piano, we recorded it, and put it
onto YouTube. This way I could send the PDF to Rick and Amy (who was about four
months pregnant at the time), and give them the URL of a performance. Cool,
huh?
Of course, there is the option to play it on piano, on toy
piano, or on any combination of the two. I suppose when we record it, we’ll do
three versions.
#88 TOYED TOGETHER
Still in that twelve-day hiatus from teaching due to the
Jewish holidays, I figured I’d finally bring a toy piano into an etude as a
partner to the piano – having really liked the toy piano stuff in my piano
concerto. So here it’s some fast unison writing, some dialoguing, and so forth
– the piece is pretty simple in terms of its dialog between the two keyboards.
The beginning unisons take off on the beginning of a synthesizer solo in the break of a song by the Brand New
Heavies – a CD of which I listened to often in the car when taking longer
trips. I don’t recall the name of the song.
#89 WARBLE
On a very cold and bleak – but bright – day at the beginning
of my spring 2009 semester (in January), as I was putting a letter on the
mailbox in front of the house for the postman to pick up, I noted a
particularly sizable bit of bird poop on the top step. I looked directly up to
the front porch light, and noted a bunch of bird poop in the fixture, too. Eww,
said I, and cleaned up the poop from both places. Later I noted a bird that was
using it as its bed, so I stuffed the fixture with newspaper.
But after I did that cleanup, I walked outside, and it
seemed even bleaker, despite the bright sunshine. And I started listening to
see if I could hear the winter birds. There were plenty of birds, but only very
simple songs – the two-note chickadee song, an occasional trumpeting blue jay
sound, and lots of chips and chirps. For some strange reason, it occurred to me
that it might be a nice challenge to take two-note chirpy sounds and try to
make an etude out of them – plus it would force me into the very high register
of the piano, which I don’t use a lot.
This premise gave me some interesting things with the
continuity – phrases that interrupt themselves, harmony that develops in odd
ways, and planned strange interruptions. I couldn’t resist taking the motives
to the low register, and joked to myself that the last gasp of the low
register, fortissimo in bar 56, was a really, really big bird yelling at all
the little ones to go away.
#90 SOLID GOLDIE
When Marilyn Nonken was planning her repertoire for her West
Coast swing in the fall of 2009, she asked me for a list of the unperformed
etudes, and I directed her to that list on my website. It was also known at
this point that I would be on the west coast at the same time she was, since I
was going to be the keynote speaker for the Festival of New American Music in
Sacramento, and that festival was one of her planned gigs. I told her she
always had the right to suggest the premise for a new etude – her immediate
response was a Goldietude. Her first daughter Goldie was just a few months old
at the time, and she thought a lullaby on Goldie’s initials might be a cool way
to go. (GCH, or Goldie Celeste Hunka).
I liked that idea, and for a repeated pitch motive, it
occurred to me first to build three-bar phrases of equal bar length – one for
each note of the motive. And then, my first real process piece, ever, kicks in
– the motive keeps being repeated in progressively shorter bars until they
shrink to just one eighth note each. In the second iteration of that process, a
full quote from the Brahms Lullaby, in the key of G-flat, kicks in. For the
middle section, I simply repeat the three note motive in perpetual motion
sixteenths, with cross accents and bitonal stuff in the other hand.
Marilyn premiered it at that festival in November, 2009,
where she noted, “this seems to be your only etude that doesn’t go anywhere”. I
commented that a) I didn’t agree, and b) why would a lullaby, of all things,
want to go somewhere?
#91 WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’
The title is, of course, a Jerry Lee Lewis pun, and there is
no quote from any Jerry Lee Lewis song. I had just finished Mikronomicon, for Boston Musica Viva,
and that was a pretty hard piece to write. I still had two more pieces to write
in the summer of 2009, but needed a respite, so of course it was etude time.
Being that I knew I was beginning what would be the last book of etudes, I figured it was time to get to some
traditional types of etude things that I had so far managed to avoid. Hence,
tremolos.
My thoughts going in were that heavily pedaled tremolos on
the piano were such a cliché that I’d avoid them when possible, and make the
tremolos both syncopated and secco, and to find a use for a tune or some
counterpoint in the available fingers not doing tremolos. The piece was written
in Maynard in July of 2009, and I was glad when it was over.
#92 YOU BLEW IT
On my website I had casually mentioned that I was looking
for etude ideas again, and Alexander Lane – an organist who had played an
arrangement of my piece “Sara” while a student at Westminster Choir College,
and who was then enrolled as an MFA student in musicology at Brandeis – sent a
handwritten letter, as well as an e-mail, with all kinds of bizarre ideas
(including a “Zaz Confrey” etude, whatever that would be). I had been thinking
of putting melodica into an etude (both the pianist and percussionist play them
in Mikronomicon), and Alex also made
such a suggestion – though with a Davy-ish title, which of course I used.
This was written back in Vermont with a view of Lake
Champlain at my work desk, and with both a melodica and my portable Yamaha
keyboard; and the premise is the left hand on the piano and the right hand on
the melodica. The idea was to play with a paradigm I use often – unisons
breaking into counterpoint and into harmony, and coming back together, etc.,
and this piece does so as well. Though at one point there is a cute, tight
canon. And there is some actual tonguing work, in repeated chords, towards the
end.
Geoff Burleson noted that both parts were quite challenging,
and that he’d call it a double etude – a left hand etude with a melodica etude
that just happens to go on at the same time.
#93 POLKRITUDE
My friend Jim Ricci has a blog called Deconstructing Jim,
and I tune in about once a month to see how it’s going. We overlapped as
students at NEC and were briefly roommates in Brookline, Massachusetts, in the
mid 80s. One of Jim’s blog entries was about the polka and about how he was
going to try to write a Modernist one. There were plenty of ironic polkas by
Russian composers, but none by Americans of which he knew.
I liked the idea, so when I finished my composing work for
the summer, I did the same. I looked up several polkas on YouTube, and figured
out the customary gestures – especially the pointless accordion virtuosity that
permeated many of them – and wrote the piece in four days, in Vermont. I sent
it to Jim, who it turns out had never written his Modernist polka, but sent me
instead his variations on Silent Night.
My piece does utilize a bit of pointless accordion
virtuosity in both hands; it also owes more than a little to those Shostakovich
and Prokofiev polkas.
#94 KNOCKSVILLE
My friend Harold Meltzer frequently calls with silly ideas
for etudes, mostly because of the clever names (example: prepared piano, but
only on all the B’s. Title: Preparation H), and at dinner he was giving me
another list. One suggestion was a knocking and hitting piece to be called The Postman Always Knocks Twice. I
didn’t like the title, but the suggestion was intriguing.
So to figure out what kinds of sounds I could make with such
a piece, I took my Flip Video to Brandeis and filmed myself knocking one of the
grand pianos in various places, with various pedaling, took it home and
listened a while, and then wrote the piece. I think there will be resistance to
the sound of slamming the lid, but the rest – well, it was a relief, I guess,
to get to write something without any tunes, harmony, or counterpoint – but
that I still had to write at the piano.
#95 FLIT
I was in contact with I-Chen Yeh, a pianist in the
contemporary performance program at Bowling Green State, about her dissertation
on my etudes (as far as I knew, the first such completed one), and could we do
a face-to-face to answer her questions. She also learned five etudes and asked
if I could coach her on them. So she and her boyfriend Karl (also in the BGSU
program) visited me at Brandeis on an off-day, and we started by her playing
the etudes, which were so marvelously done that I asked for permission to film
and put them onto YouTube.
Later, I took them, and Beff, to lunch at a Thai restaurant
in Maynard, she did the interview, and I mentioned that she and Karl could
always suggest etudes. So in addition to a “resonance” etude (which I never got
around to), she suggested she liked various textures in Ravel’s Gaspard. Good,
said I, and I asked her on what note they would be based – she mentioned G
below middle C and the F a little less than two octaves higher. Those would be
the fulcrum notes of the piece.
For whatever reason, when I got to the point of writing this
– during my Passover vacation – the backdrop to those flitty gestures that came
to me was a morse code kind of uneven repeated note thing. So that becomes the
“point” of the etude, while the Ravel-type gestures become sort of the
decorations. Often chords build up from G to that F, or down from that F to
that G. Being as the gestures were flitty, the piece is called Flit, as in the
motion of a moth around a flame.
#96 DOUBLE CROSS
It was time for the big cross-accent etude. Just about all
of them have cross accents anyway, but to build a bigger piece around such a
thing was the challenge for this one, and was the first compositional project
for my 2010-11 sabbatical. At the start, it’s just a major second that builds
into an almost-blues scale thing, but then other things happen, and after a
while the major second thing saturated my head and made me think of the
beginning of Golliwog’s Cakewalk. Thus there is a very well-hidden quote, only
in the right hand, of that piece at the end.
I went to Facebook for a “title sweepstakes” for this piece,
since none of the titles that had come to me were that good. Adam Marks won the
sweepstakes by suggesting “Double Crossed”, which I edited just a bit. So, it’s
my first etude named online.
#97 QUIETUDE
Every book of études has to have one simple one that even I
can play, and this is the one for Book X. It’s yet another one on just one kind
of chord, this one being on dominant seventh chords. I used the Schumannesque
falling arpeggio texture for the opening premise, and to make it more interesting
in the middle, stretch out the counterpoint a bit to get sonorities that are
different, and more dissonant.
Augusta Thomas is a very, very good friend, and has been a
fan of the études for a long time. It’s because of her programming of some at
the Chicago Symphony that I met Amy Briggs, for instance, and she programmed
six for the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood in summer 2009 (my first
performance there since I was a Fellow in 1982). She herself has six piano
études, one of them dedicated to me, so here I return the favor. As it seems
her favorites are E-Machines and
several of the slower ones.
#98 MOSSO
Geoff Burleson had suggested a wildly virtuosic etude based
on the rising-and-falling texture of the “Ocean Wave” etude of Chopin, Op. 25
No. 12. I looked up several videos of the piece on YouTube, and that piece
seems to conquer more pianists than conquer it. I became briefly obsessed with
the Chopin piece itself, and watched the Valentina Lisitsa YouTube video
several times – mostly to see what the hand positions are like to get such fast
up-and-down. So my piece starts with a similar shape, but of course mixes it up
and makes it harder by having the hand shifts in each hand not coincide.
The title comes from the nickname Ocean Wave given to the
Chopin étude and Italian newspaper weather reports from the year I spent in
Rome. Relative turbulence on the sea in the marine reports was called “poco
mosso,” “mosso”, and “molto mosso”.
#99 MANO WAR
A piece I had to write because I liked the title. It’s
pretty much a sped-up, and much more intense, version of Fists of Fury, except without the fists – though when writing it, I
was thinking more of the beginning of the cadenza of my piano concerto. Since
it’s getting towards the end of the études all time, there is an extremely,
extremely well-hidden, but incomplete, quote from Smoke on the Water, spread across both hands in m. 65 into the
downbeat of m. 66. Geoff Burleson calls this piece “a great piano piece, and a
great conga piece, too”.
#100 TWO GREAT TASTES
Adam Marks had been suggesting, for some time, a four-hands
étude, likely to play with Amy Briggs – since they’re both in Chicago – and my
thoughts about that went towards writing two études that can be played
separately, or together with one of them as the Primo and the other the Secondo
in a four-hands version. After finishing Mano
War, it was my birthday and at dinner I described this premise to Beff, who
suggested I call it “Two Great Tastes,” after the classic Reese’s Peanut Butter
Cup commercials.
There is a bit of back story to the expression, as well. My
band piece Ten of a Kind, which I
wrote for the Marine Band in 2000 used ten clarinets as a kind of concerto
soloist, but it was also structured like a symphony – in fact, I called it my
Symphony #2. When the band took it to the WASBE conference in Lucerne,
Switzerland, my only responsibility (in exchange for airfare, hotel, and
meals), was to speak for 2 or 3 minutes before the performance, to an
international audience. Most of them Swiss. When I said the piece was both a
concerto and a symphony, I added, “two great tastes that taste great together”,
as in the Reese’s commercial. Dead silence. Most of the audience didn’t have
that reference.
In any case, given Beff’s suggestion, I called each
half-étude one of the two great tastes – peanut butter, in German, and
chocolate, in Italian. But wait, there’s more. Since those commercials always
have the lines “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!” and “you got chocolate
in my peanut butter!”, there is a brief section in each sub-étude where it is
infected by the other one. Which is noted in the scores in bar 36.
Where the denouement occurs, starting in bar 39, there are
quotes from other études as befit the players for whom it was written –
Erdnußbutter arpeggiates the opening harmonies of “Not”, written for Adam; and
Cioccolato references “Taking the Fifths”, which has always been one of my
favorites. Then there is a proper recapitulation, and a running out of steam.
The final gesture, in Cioccolato is also the final gesture in E-Machines (the bottom two black keys on
the piano), thus providing a kind of closure for the whole set.