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PROGRAM NOTE back to Program Notes Last modified 22 March 2022 PIANO ÉTUDES Reynolds’s Piano Études comprise two Books of six studies each. The first, “Origins,” involves simpler forms that are categorically limited (e.g., the bombastic Barrage) or simply meander (e.g., the darting Mercurial). The second Book, “Extensions,” explores more complex forms, where categories are freely extended or more intricately elaborated. The overall “agenda” of these études is to survey what the important sets from the past offered as the domain of the form evolved from the realm of “mere” digital dexterity, through increasingly individualistic profiles (referred to in their titles) as multifaceted commentaries on the state of music under the influence of historical change and performative capacity. As with many of his works since the 1989 Pulitzer prize-winning Whispers Out of Time (which references Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Opus 81a – “Les Adieux” and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in a lineage of successive quotation), Reynolds’s Études also entail revisiting, borrowing, recontextualizing, and commenting upon music from our shared past. Later, other ways of “revisiting” tradition and honoring its richness developed: in particular, identifying short “seeds” that were provocative or appropriate to his own music’s purposes, and then composing into and out of them—from his now, to their then, and back. Each étude engages with particular études of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, or Ligeti. Thus, while remaining idiosyncratic, each study is touched by relevant aspects of a larger historical context. External references can be slight (as with a concluding reference to Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses in Barrage) or very extensive. Book I’s Fixities, for instance, is dominated by the gravitational pull of Chopin’s Op. 25, no, 7, its throbbing chordal regularities and the interstitial flourishes. As an instance of Reynolds’s bringing of the past into our time, consider Calligraphy from Book II. This is, as it happens, the second étude based on the Chopin Op. 25, no. 7 (the first occurring in Book I), and it follows the original quite literally. It spins out a linear continuity that is constantly changing in regard to its normatives: number of pitches sounded simultaneously, contrasting densities of events, changing registral continuity of the line. It is a rhapsodic étude. The urgency of its anacrusic elements propels the line forward. Each Book contains one study that can be fragmented and used connectively, binding together the other études in its Book. Mercurial serves this purpose in Book I. In any performance, the individual studies in the Book can be performed in any order and connected variably by indicated fragments from Mercurial. Mercurial, itself, can be represented by extensive use as a linking agent as well as by a full, unbroken performance of its content. In Book II, the linking étude is Field. The composer’s aim here was to update the idea of a numbered collection of idiosyncratic movements and invite the performer to shape a continuity of their own design. His hope is that the performer(s) will take the opportunity offered to allow the materials of individual études to become distinctively interactive in new ways for each performance. Finally, it is worth noting that part of the stimulus for undertaking the Piano Études project was the visit of György Ligeti to San Diego the year that he won the Kyoto Prize. Reynolds took his grad students to this event which involved a high-quality film of P-L Aimard performing some of the prize-winning études. Ligeti and Reynolds spoke after the presentation about Ligeti’s earlier visit to UC San Diego and their shared interest in another composer whom they both respected, Conlon Nancarrow, and his “extra-human” studies. |
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