[mgj32]

Hi Adrian, Mark,
Now you've got me thinking about etudes. When I listened to "Parallel Intervals..." first, I had just read your description of the composition process, so I expected a piece of music organized around the idea of intervals, and I heard a piece so organized, but I forgot about all that fairly quickly and was hearing some music that I liked. One might consider it a pianistic study or a compositional study. But so could almost anything else.

Chopin has some wonderful pieces that he called etudes. But give them names that seem to fit the sound, and would they be considered etudes any more than one of his waltzes or sonatas? For instance, call the "Revolutionary Etude," "The Spirit of Revolution." Or call the Db Waltz "Etude in Db," rather than the "Minute Waltz." What would change? I can't really think of anything other than perhaps a general audience might be more inclined to choose the titles that didn't suggest the pieces were studies to listen to first, if given a list.

All of this doesn't lead anywhere, really. But it brought back faint memories of a time so long ago that it must have been in a previous incarnation when I was assigned Schumann's "Album for the Young," if that's the title--anyhow the one that "The Happy Farmer" is in. I was working on Rachmaninoff preludes, for heaven's sake, so why was I being made to regress? I think I was really working on a set of what my teacher decided were, for me, etudes by Schumann, and the he was trying to make me hear that I was playing the pieces as if I were a music box, and I eventually learned things such as a little rubato can go a long way.

So isn't every piece of music an etude?

all best,
mgj