Patterns and Fantasies on the Way to Parnassus:

Roger Reynolds’s Piano Etudes Books I and II

by Thomas May

Despite the reward promised by the commonplace saying, practice at most bears an asymptotic relationship to perfection. Still, the very act of striving “to exploit and perfect a chosen facet of performing technique” – to quote Grove Music’s primary definition of the purpose of the instrumental etude – has inspired artistic breakthroughs that seem incommensurate with such utilitarian goals. “Forgive me – I sound as if I’ve just discovered music,” Debussy wrote after completing his Études in 1915, overcome by a spirit of artistic rejuvenation near the end of his life.

Still operating at a creative peak in his 80s, Roger Reynolds completed the second of his two books of etudes in 2017. This premiere recording of the integral set of 12 etudes, performed with an ideal balance of poetry and virtuosity by Eric Huebner, documents the composer’s significant and original contribution to this curious, if not outright paradoxical, genre. Reynolds, like the august company of earlier practitioners of the etude with whom he engages in intricate conversations throughout, transforms an allegedly pragmatic quest for technical improvement into the vehicle for aesthetic adventure and enlightenment.

The linear progress implied by the traditional trope of the gradus ad Parnassum or “steps to Parnassus” – coveted goal of the art-loving initiate – is here replaced by an indeterminate sequence such that the performer is at liberty to choose the number of etudes to be presented (even repeating them if desired) as well as their order.

Reynolds envisions performers making the most of this freedom “to allow the materials of individual etudes to become distinctively interactive in new ways for each performance,” as he writes in his note to the score. In this sense, the metaphoric student – the performer seeking improvements – becomes a co-creator with the composer-mentor, sharing considerable power. The performer has a say in controlling not only the destination but the terrain to be traversed along the way. Reciprocally, the composer has adopted the curiosity-fueled attitude of the student in his search for implications to be “mined” from his musical materials.

Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds uses a wide span of technical issues to sculpt dramatically varying soundscapes and structures. But the etudes encompass more than abrupt juxtapositions in diverse directions, for Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second six constitute a difference in kind rather than an extension. Their complexity is intensified, their investigations more extreme, even though they make comparable technical demands.

Reynolds’s life work is associated with a remarkable diversity of instrumental and vocal combinations as well as cross-disciplinary collaborations and experiments with new technologies. Yet that familiar and reliable instrument, the piano, has served throughout his long career as a creative anchor. He vividly recalls that discovering Vladimir Horowitz’s account of Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major at a young age was “like being struck by lightning.” *

In spite of a meager education in music in Detroit’s schools, he became mesmerized by Horowitz’s “immense malleability of expressive intent, an inventiveness that allowed him to change his outlook on the music every few seconds as though shifting gears.” Not by coincidence is Chopin such a palpable presence in his etudes – a presence that is intriguingly recognizable yet discreet and simultaneously metabolized by Reynolds’s unique musical language.

Piano studies with Kenneth Aitken when Reynolds was a teenager provided a key element of his “musical awakening” because of his teacher’s interest in cultural context as integral to understanding a piece of music. It was again the work of a pianist that impelled Reynolds to follow his path as a composer. He refers to experiencing Paul Jacobs performing Copland’s Piano Variations: “The thing that so astonished me was the sense of composite gesture, moving from one part of the keyboard to another with an almost demonic focus and precision.” As a result, he wrote Fantasy for Pianist in 1964 with Jacobs in mind. Though Jacobs himself never played it, Fantasy was a milestone as the first work he wrote after leaving formal studies at the University of Michigan.

Nearly a half-century later, Fantasy for Pianist resurfaced as the source for Barrage, which is published as the first etude of Book I (but occurs as the last of the six in the order chosen by Eric Huebner on this recording). Both books of etudes make frequent reference to Reynolds’s earlier works for the keyboard.

Still another layer of external allusions transpires in characteristically subtle quotations from the traditional literature of piano etudes. The lineup Reynolds has chosen includes (in chronological order), Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti. Yet these allusions are not mere homages. These quotations range from fleeting (a wisp of Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses at the end of Barrage) to obsessive (Chopin’s Etude in c-sharp minor, Op. 25, No. 7, haunts two entire etudes, one in each book). Often, as when Debussy’s Étude No. 8 (pour les agréments) steals in on the scene in Book I’s Mercurial, the context has prepared it so well that the “other” material seems to need no quotation marks, as it were, but simply makes itself at home, like good friends picking up a conversation.

Sometimes Reynolds offers implicit commentary on a predecessor. When Book II’s Rips weaves in a pattern from Liszt’s Transcendental Étude No. 10, the new context sheds light on a figure that otherwise might be played with mechanical finesse that is unaware of its potential musical qualities. Liszt himself, according to Reynolds, “doesn’t at first seem to understand what he’s done, which is to introduce a lilt by taking a continuity and breaking it by octaves, not until after he does this.”

Ligeti, as it happened, became an impetus for Reynolds to take up the etudes project. After winning the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2001, Ligeti was invited to give a presentation in San Diego. Reynolds recalls being intrigued by “the audacity of what Ligeti did with his etudes. The knuckle-busting density of his work was interesting to me, but also perplexing” because it made his etudes seem “labored.” Repeated encounters with the etudes of Ligeti and other composers made Reynolds realize that the genre can sound “clinical, like one gymnastic exercise after another, becoming task-driven music” – even though “etudes, by their nature, should be problematic in significant ways.” As a result, he decided that he wanted his etudes “to embrace the full composite of historical issues, from finger and mental dexterity to evocative natures and reconnection with various pasts.”

Collaborating with Eric Huebner on the 2009 release Epigram and Evolution, an anthology of his complete piano works up to that point, additionally led Reynolds to value Huebner’s extraordinary capacity to combine virtuoso technique with Zen-like concentration. Their artistic bond inspired Reynolds to contemplate writing his own brand of etudes. After all of these stimuli had been allowed to percolate over the years, he finally started jotting down ideas in 2010.

The composer has long followed a regimen of devoting a bound notebook, obtained from a favorite shop in Basel, Switzerland, to each compositional project. He begins by brainstorming designs and outlines on the right-hand pages and then comes back to flesh out his plans in greater detail on the left-hand pages. The notebook assigned to the first book of etudes is inscribed with the date “July 20, 2010.” The first book was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation.

From the start, the notebook shows that Reynolds planned to write two books, each containing six etudes; one of these in each book (Mercurial and Field, respectively) was to play a special role of being “fragmentable” and thus providing connective tissue to bind together the other etudes. “Each etude has a central ‘issue’ (technical, musical) that requires a particular sort of attentiveness,” Reynolds noted when first planning the etudes.

Even before composing any of the etudes in Book II, Reynolds had a clear conception of the advances this continuation of what he had done in Book I should make. In his note for Book I, he writes: “Origins involves simpler forms that are categorically limited (e.g., the bombastic Barrage) or simply meander (e.g., the darting Mercurial). Formally, these studies have fewer sub-sections that tend towards identical durations and symmetrical lay-out. The second Book, Extensions, will use more complex forms, where categories are freely extended or more intricately elaborated.”

A hiatus followed completion of Book I in January 2011. Dated November 25, 2016, a note for Book II lays further ground for the new path to be followed in the “sequel”: “What can ‘open’ mean? In Book I, as a focus on ‘behaviors’ (e.g., Alternation), it was necessarily present in varied forms throughout, at least most of, the whole. So, Book II has to be more categorically extreme. What was rigidly iterative in Book I is Pattern in Book II; what was fancily unfocused is Fantasy.” This “binary” of pattern and fantasy – and how to navigate from one to the other, whether in a gradual way (pattern to fantasy or vice versa) or suddenly – is itself malleable, according to Reynolds, insofar as it plays out “in varying proportion, tightly patterned behaviors or freely evolving fantasies on them. The ‘pattern’ could be in only one dimension, i.e., time, but not pitch content or vice versa.”

Reynolds clarifies the “issues” pertaining to all twelve etudes as follows (given here in the order Eric Huebner has chosen for this recording):

Book I (Origins) Mercurial: very rapid conjunct and disjunct passage work, registrally extensive.

Persistence: patterned iterations of chordal elements, each with independent periodicity. Each element sticks to it rigorously, persistently. Ripples and waves interact and make a kind of latticework – like the waves on the surface of the Aegean, which at the time fascinated me with its multi-faceted glitter.

Alternation: the game here is the simplest: alternating up, down, up, down, up, down in all ways: as local patterns, as trills, tremolos, shifting densities, width and speed. Both hands are constantly active, often moving at different speeds and playing with different sorts of articulative norms. By the end, the alternation is no longer of local patterns, but of massive chords, registrally placed, still up and down.

Web: overlapping periodicities, very quiet and registrally separated. The task is to manage very rapid displacements of both hands while making it all seem effortless and quiet. From time to time, wide glissandi connect events in remote registers. There are also occasional moments that refer to – as brief memories in the midst of a trance – other etudes from this book.

Fixities: evolving, chordal regularities with figurative connections. The structure is repetitive, but not symmetrical. This is the first of the two major appearances of Chopin’s Etude Op 25, No. 7.

Barrage: meant to be at the edge of the reasonable, with a sustained overall intensity of very rapid two-hand chordal sequences that seem relentless; low-register comments added while keeping the high-register insistence unbroken.

Book II (Extensions) Migration: concerned with searching how far one can go away from …; migrating continuously, whirring, two-handed conjunct continuities normally but not always synchronous between the two hands, with varying densities (two to four). Migration as an exercise in hope and the aim of arriving somewhere secure. This arrival happens only at the very end.

Concatenation: How many ways can a set of elements be disposed? A small collection of idiosyncratic elements that weave in unexpected reconfigurations and alliances over time; at first, playful, impulsive, even impish in character but evolving toward a deep, meditative state at the end, with spacious onsets that are inflected as they die away.

Calligraphy: what is the variable span of gesture that retains its momentum? This is the second etude to refer to Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 7, but this time is closely based on the source; a rhapsodic etude that is, strangely, sometimes almost a pseudo march.

Rips: what allows us to experience trajectory? monotonic directionalities that overlap and interlock, normally, registrally wide, but sometimes gesturally truncated. How to allow this to happen simultaneously with differing speeds, with only two hands moored to a body? Over time, the very slow traversal of Rips becomes harmonic content itself.

Insistence: How fixed can content be? Insistence is not persistence, hanging around with the same stuff. It is looking for an escape route from a migration behavior: you are someplace and you want to get out. Though frustrated, you don't give up. You insist upon finding a way. The music stays with certain articulated patternings, as though trapped, then suddenly moves on. In the end, the seemingly uncontrollable simultaneity of iterating chords achieves an unstable realization. Both hands are playing different changing densities of chords and are a little out of phase. A kind of arrival, but troubled.

Field: How variable can density be? Each decisive event should feel like a sonic object that exists without a necessary connection to what precedes or follows it; there are “shadows cast on the tails of resonances.” The seed for this concept can be found in Concatenation: do something, let it die, and maybe inflect it as it is dying.

For Reynolds – just as for the “student” – the nonlinear process traced by the etudes entails overlapping layers of foreshadowing, doubling back, reconsidering. Everything seems always already there – including not only the etudes of past composers, but Reynolds’s own past, in the form of recurrent allusions to such works as Fantasy for Pianist, The Angel of Death, imAge/piano, and Traces. The idiosyncratic elements of Concatenations thus foretell/replicate their more extreme versions in Field – microcosmic fragmentations of the idiosyncrasies that comprise each of the twelve etudes, available for a kind of Boulezian prolifération. In this way, Reynolds achieves an astonishing sense of unity amid such mind- and finger-stretching diversity.

*Quotations are from an interview with Roger Reynolds conducted by Thomas May on 18 March 2021 via Zoom. © 2021 Thomas May