On A Book of Etudes

A Book of Etudes is a study of the constitution of playing-together— soloists wrestle with endurance and precision, ensembles wrestle with carefully constructed rhythmic and textural puzzles, audiences wrestle with understandings of 'the work'. It is a collection of 21 linked but autonomous works that are parts of a whole, but will not be experienced as such. The set contains all combinations of clarinet, cello, and piano: three trio etudes, nine duo etudes (three for each possible duo combination of the three instruments), and nine solo etudes (three for each instrument). The length of each etude will average 7 minutes, and so any performance will be a subset of the etudes, and so of the aesthetic and technical attributes of the Book, mixing instrumentations, affects, and formal structures. These works continue the Apollonian/Dionysian tension of the genre, exploiting the gap between the abstraction of composition and the embodied reality of performance. Historical and Philosophical Framing The etude is and always has been an alchemical admixture of clarity and mystery. The title A Book of Etudes places this project squarely within a genre, and so binds the project to the entailments of that genre. The concept of 'etude' interweaves notions of performance (the technical, the virtuosic, and the scholarly) with classical ideas of the cultivation of the self and that self's physical capacity. Etudes are "technical" and develop "technique", and so invoke the mechanical and the impersonal, perhaps at the expense of the expressive. The history of the etude-concept in practice has been one focused on the expression of the self in social context. Etymologically, "technique" drives from the Greek "techne"; in the classical philosophical tradition the development of skill is wrapped up in an individual's advancement towards their own particular excellence ("arete"). Even in the etude's pedagogical origins, the self is visible— the transformation of technique is a transformation of the student. It is later that the virtuosi of the 18th and 19th century brought the etude to the concert hall and the salon; virtuosity became not merely technique, but also the assumption of the mantle of master. The etude in performance announces itself, making public the privacy of its studied-ness. It raises the risk of failure; one can feel stakes being raised on the slow march between the wings and center stage, ever closer to the performer's salto mortale. In this transition from the practice room to concert hall there is a parallel shift from performance towards a composerly techne within the etude. The object of study of Debussy's eight-fingered Etude No. 6 re-emerges in Ligeti's "Touches Bloquées"; both require masterful performance technique, but also set the problematic of the work as the dialogue between compositional and performative challenges. The etude-concept is a superb example of the strife of Apollonian and Dionysian that shapes all music; the tension between the technical and the aesthetic. Consider the manuscript of the finale of Beethoven's Op 131: 'tantot libre, tantot recherchee' ("in part free, in part studied"), an indication not of the division of those characters, but rather their linkage. Consider the endless critiques of the 20th century music as an art shackled by its own abstractions, despite the intensity of experiencing that music, felt by its critics at least as much as by its supporters. In the post-virtuosity of today's performance space, the superhuman is a commonplace, and so the elegant minutiae of music's 'techne' are revealed as the core of the mechanisms of meaningfulness. The challenges of an etude are made public be they performative of compositional. It is the expressive precision of both composer and performer that sustains such music at the edge of comprehension and apprehension– the public display of the private that is an etude.