Karen L. Rogers and Dr. Jeffrey L. Shumway, Music
Nineteenth-century composers changed the piano etude from a relatively dry technical exercise to a concert piece that explored new possibilities of technique and musicality. In the twentiethcentury, composers of the piano etude invented new ways of approaching the piano, integrated a variety of unusual artistic influences and introduced new challenges and twists to traditional piano technique. The changes made to the piano etude in the nineteenth century are fairly well known. However, the piano etudes of the twentieth century are less often played or researched.
I studied how composers of the twentieth-century piano etude extended the boundaries of form and technique beyond the nineteenth-century model and how concurrent movements in artistic, popular and folk culture influenced their work. My study specifically focused on etudes by three composers representing different countries, periods and eras spanning the twentieth century:
Etude XI: Pour les arpèges composés by Claude Debussy (1915, France),
Boogie Woogie Etude by Morton Gould (1943, United States), and
Etude III: Touches Bloquées by György Ligeti (1985, Hungary).
I concentrated most of my project on the influence of movements in the surrounding culture, especially how similar artistic movements influenced composers in different ways. I conducted independent research on these etudes concurrently while studying with my faculty mentor, Dr. Shumway, to memorize them and prepare them for performance.
György Ligeti’s “Etude III: Touches Bloquées” reflects his interest in new rhythms, aural illusions and new technical approaches. In this etude Ligeti actually creates a new kind of piano technique (based on the writings of Henning Seidentopf). Some of the piano keys are held down by one hand while the other hand plays them. Because certain keys are held down, no sound is created when those keys are pressed. This makes a small rest (instead of a tone) when those notes are played, creating a sporadic, random-sounding rhythmic pattern.
Ligeti’s music also reflects his fascination with the rhythms of sub-Saharan Africa and the art of M.C. Escher. In his music he tries to produce musical illusions similar to the optical illusions seen in Escher’s work. Ligeti especially likes to create the illusion of several things happening at once at totally different rates of speed- all performed with only two hands. He particularly is interested in the illusion of different rhythms occurring simultaneously at different rates of speed.
Morton Gould grew up in America in the height of the Jazz age. His music is filled with “American” elements, combining folk, jazz and popular music with classical forms. His works avoid the predictable and are filled with unexpected key changes and shifting rhythms. Motives and fragments of motives often appear in variant forms as a unifying device. “Boogie Woogie Etude” draws on the idiom of boogie-woogie jazz piano. This piece has a strong rhythmic drive and lots of syncopated accents. It combines the driving repetitive bass line of boogie-woogie piano with the dissonant elements typical of twentieth century classical music.
ebussy’s “Etude XI: Pour les arpèges composés” focuses on delicate arpeggio figuration, requiring the pianist to make the piano sound like it has no hammers. While Debussy is often labeled an “Impressionist,” he felt more of a kinship to the French Symbolist poets. Rather than using a logical and sequential grammatical structure, Symbolist poets wrote in a series of verbal images to evoke a sensory, rather than cerebral, response. This etude shows Debussy’s use of this approach. Rather than developing motivic ideas he presents motives and motivic fragments as coloristic shading to the arpeggio background. He does not develop the motives through repetition. Instead, each appearance of a motive has a different shading and emotional value.1
Debussy, inspired by the Symbolist interest in the exotic, also incorporates some elements of non-Western poetic ideas in this etude. One such idea is the Malayan pantun. In this form whole lines repeat according to a specific pattern, the second and fourth lines of each quatrain becoming the first and third lines of the next.2 Each pair of lines elicits a certain image, but the shades of meaning evoked by the image change when it reappears in a different context of the poem.3 Debussy uses this principle loosely, with many motives reappearing in different contexts.
On March 31, 2000 in the Madsen Recital Hall, Harris Fine Arts Center, I performed the etudes by Gould and Debussy as part of my senior piano recital. In preparation for this, I studied scores and various recordings as well as analyzed, memorized and prepared the scores of the etudes selected for performance. For the benefit of the audience, I gave a brief synopsis of my research on those two etudes in written program notes. I also prepared the score, studied and memorized sections of the Ligeti, although I did not perform it. I used a facsimile of the manuscript score in my research and study of the Ligeti etude. To conclude my research project, I wrote a five-page paper on “The Influence of Symbolism on Debussy’s Etude XI: Pour les arpèges composés.”
References
- Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1976), 163.
- Nicholas Routley, “Debussy and Baudelaire’s Harmonie du Soir,” Musicology Australia XV (1992): 77.
- Wenk, 82.