Philip Glass
Complete piano etudes (b. 1937)
MÁIRE CARROLL PIANO
Etude 1 [5:18]
Etude 2 [7:38]
Etude 3 [4:28]
Etude 4 [4:37]
Etude 5 [9:02]
Etude 6 [5:21]
Etude 7 [5:42]
Etude 8 [5:46]
Etude 9 [4:02]
Etude 10 [6:03]
[58:04]
Etude 11 [7:19]
12 [7:27]
13 [3:46]
14 [7:18]
15 [6:40]
16 [5:45]
17 [7:34]
18 [6:30]
With special thanks to Ger McNaughton
Recorded on 16-18 January 2023 at St Peter’s Church, Drogheda, Co Louth, Ireland
Producer: Laoise O’Brien
Engineer: Ben Rawlins
24-bit digital editing & mixing: Ben Rawlins
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 544371
Cover & artist photography © Laura Sheeran
Design: Eliot Garcia
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com @ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records
When Artisan Publishers released a deluxe edition of Philip Glass’s music last year, it was not without significance that they chose his set of Etudes for solo piano. Containing newly edited and engraved folios of Glass’s scores, alongside a book entitled Studies in Time that featured essays by performers, composers, collaborators, multimedia artists, choreographers, and film directors on the composer’s music, this lavish publication was far more than a vanity project: it reflected the fact that Glass’s Piano Etudes have become a core work in the composer’s output, forming an indispensable part of many pianists’ contemporary repertoire. Hailed by editors Linda Brumbach and Alisa E. Regas as ‘a modern masterpiece’, Glass’s piano studies include some of his most performed and recorded works, and contain some of the composer’s most imaginative, inventive, and powerful music.
In many respects, the rise of Glass’s etudes as one of the pinnacles of his creative legacy forms an unlikely success story in an illustrious career that now spans over sixty years. Music for solo piano played a peripheral role during the first three decades of Glass’s musical activities. The composer wrote primarily for his own group, The Philip Glass Ensemble (comprising keyboards, flutes, saxophones and voices), during the
late 1960s and 1970s, before moving on to large-scale operatic and symphonic forces in the late 1970s and 1980s. During this time, the piano as a solo instrument was largely conspicuous by its absence.
Nevertheless, by the late 1980s, Glass had produced enough music – mainly through repurposing material originally written for film, theatre and dance commissions – to furnish an album of solo piano compositions. Called simply Solo Piano, the album was released by CBS in 1989.
Appropriately enough, Glass was the soloist on Solo Piano, but the future composer had come fairly late to piano playing, as a student studying mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago. Glass was (and is) by his own admission a pianist of limited technical ability – it is for this reason that he has tended only to perform and record his own music. Technical restrictions notwithstanding, invitations continued to arrive from concert venues and promoters during the 1990s for performances of Glass’s solo piano music with the composer at the piano. Thus, the idea of producing a set of etudes emerged out of a twofold need: first, for Glass to provide himself with new repertoire to satisfy an increasingly demanding schedule of
solo piano concert tours; second, to assist the composer’s development of his own technical skills as a performer.
There is, one might say, an etude for every age and an age for every etude. The significance of Glass’s set of twenty studies lies partly in the way they draw on the form’s historical past while also breaking away from it by offering new solutions to old challenges.
Glass divides the Etudes into two books of ten each. The first ten, comprising Book 1, are more study-like in scope than the Book 2 set. Etude 1, for example, begins assertively with four bold major chords, whose upper notes descend in contrary movement against a rising bass line. The music quickly settles into G minor, with both hands executing a series of triadic patterns in triplet rhythms. These are followed by rising and falling scale-like melodies against two-note repeating figures, with the figures swapped between both hands at various points. The etude ends with a mini-recapitulation in which the opening block chord idea is followed by a short statement of the triplet pattern.
If a certain measure of control and stamina is required in Etude 1, the final etude of Book 1 – Etude 10 – represents a study of
endurance in extremis. Based on an oscillating B flat major dominant-seventh chord, around which Glass weaves call-and-response-type motives and horn-call-like figures, the twonote idea is repeated around a thousand times during the etude’s seven-minute timespan!
While some of the Book 1 etudes represent studies in the literal sense of the word, others are closer to exercises in compositional skill and musical expression than in pianistic technique. The introspective Etude 2 plays out a series of eight variations based on a slowly descending ten-bar melody that alternates between groups of seven and eight quavers – the piano’s extreme upper and lower range brought into play via the use of hand-crossing and octave leaps – while the arioso-like Etude 8 presents a sixteen-bar melodic theme in a songlike AABB form. These are studies in compositional style and expression as much as anything else.
Glass arrived at Book 1 in somewhat piecemeal fashion, and the final sequence does not appear to reflect the original order of composition. The conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies premiered the first six etudes in 1994, but these eventually appeared in the published set as Nos 2–5 and 9–10. The original ‘Etude 4’ became Etude 9, while
Etude 10 was formerly ‘Etude 6’. The sixth and seventh studies were composed in 1994 and 1996 respectively, suggesting that the first two studies written by Glass were likely to have been the first and eighth.
Glass had already completed several of the studies that came to form Book 2 by the time he went into the studio to record Book 1 for his label Orange Mountain Music in 2002. The remaining etudes in Book 2 were to take on life of their own in the hands and fingers of more gifted pianists, however. Etudes 12 and 13 were commissioned by Bruce Levingston for a performance given by the pianist in New York in 2007, while Etudes 18–20 were written in 2012 and performed the following year in Perth, Australia, by the Japanese pianist Maki Namekawa, who went on to release the first recording of all twenty etudes on Orange Mountain Music in 2014.
Glass has stated that Book 2 is ‘about the language of music itself’. One can take this idea further by seeing the second set of etudes as emancipating Glass’s musical language from the physical and practical constraints brought about by his own pianistic limitations. If what appears in Book 1 falls comfortably ‘under the hands’, the terrain in Book 2 becomes altogether more challenging, hazardous and unpredictable.
One need look no further than Etude 11, with its sectionalised design, abrupt contrasts, unpredictable leaps, oddly spaced intervals, challenging contrapuntal combinations, and complex interlocking metres. Several etudes in Book 2 explore harmonic and rhythmic ambiguities in ways only hinted at in the more straight-shooting first set. Etude 12 ingeniously develops its material out of a basic hemiola pattern, while Etude 13 juxtaposes minor and major chords on A alongside syncopated rhythms and coruscating contrary motion movement. Etude 17 also starts off by alternating minor and major – this time over an E root – before shifting up by a half-step to F minor. On the other hand, the intensely lyrical final Etude 20 starts with a series of rising figures in C major but ends despairingly in A minor. Its three sections are each re-presented in a different order, meaning that the restatement of the opening C major theme is delayed until around two-thirds of the way through the study, its return made more powerful and poignant as a result.
How to play these etudes? For Glass, the key aim has always been to retain a sense of musicality in performance. While his advice sounds easy in theory, this hasn’t always been the case in practice, with some pianists using some etudes (such as the
Lisztian-style Etude 6) to show off how fast they can play. Not so on this recording by Máire Carroll, whose fluent and generously informed interpretations adhere more closely and accurately to Glass’s original tempo markings and dynamic indications.
On the surface, some of Glass’s etudes may come across as mechanical exercises, but it’s easy to forget amidst the array of arpeggios, ostinatos, repeating patterns, and scalelike passages that they also contain some the composer’s most intensely personal music. Etude 5 is a case in point – its accumulating layers gradually revealing a desperate sense of inconsolable sadness and loss. (The first etudes were composed the same year as the tragic and untimely death of Glass’s third wife, the artist Candy Jernigan, at the age of only 39.) Meanwhile, the introspective Etude 16 picks up where Etude 8 ends – a hesitant accompanying seven-note figure in the left hand providing the perfect backdrop for its turn-like figures and rising and falling semitone lines.
Brumbach and Regas have described the etudes as a self-portrait of Glass’s work, while pianist and composer Timo Andres sees a cathartic quality running through the entire set, culminating in the final etude. Nico Muhly has described them
as ‘little diagrams of where Glass’s head is at the time’. Whatever the case, Glass’s Piano Etudes represent one of the great pianistic statements of our era – studies in time that rank alongside Chopin and Liszt’s achievements in this form during the nineteenth century, Debussy and Rachmaninov’s in the early twentieth, and Ligeti and Unsuk Chin’s in the late twentieth and early twenty-first.
© 2024 Pwyll ap Siôn
Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University. He has published several books and articles on composers associated with minimalist music, including Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Michael Nyman, and contributes regularly to Gramophone as a writer and reviewer.
PS: How did you end up recording Glass’s Piano Etudes?
MC: Learning the set became a bit of a lockdown project for me. I had played some of them before, but during that period I set myself the target of learning a new study every two weeks or so. Obviously, lockdown was a disastrous time for everybody –including many artists whose concert schedules were cancelled completely – but having that goal meant that when the pandemic eased off, I had them all learnt.
PS: You were working on your PhD around this time, which also involved performing the Glass set.
MC: Yes. In addition to submitting a written thesis, I had to give several recitals, which was quite challenging. I had to perform around twelve of the etudes for the exam, but in fact this gave me a real boost to go ahead and learn the rest. It was a huge time commitment because some of the etudes in Book 2 are much longer, and I was learning and performing them all from memory.
PS: Memorising them must be really challenging because of the nature of the way they’re composed. Certain sections are repeated verbatim, others are partially
repeated, while other sections are heard only once. Listeners sometimes overlook how challenging it can be to play this music.
MC: Etude 5 is a good example of this kind of structural layering. Glass starts off with a simple idea in the left hand before adding a melody in the right hand. He then adds a further layer and suddenly you’re having to juggle three separate ideas. You can’t play the material in the same way as before but at the same time it’s important to retain the same sound and articulation that’s heard at the beginning. I think all of that’s often overlooked in Glass’s music.
PS: The challenge is to keep the sound and expression consistent throughout.
MC: Yes. It’s all about the control. You’re probably doing it very well if you manage to execute that sense of absolute control over the material, avoiding any textural lumps or bumps. Etude 10 is a good example, where the two-note oscillating figure that’s heard through the piece starts off in the right hand before moving to the left, then back and forth between left and right on several occasions. The skill is to ensure that the pattern sounds consistent, whether it’s being played by the left or by the right hand.
PS: People often have preconceived ideas about composers, but Glass seems to suffer from it more than most!
MC: Actually, I think the tide has turned a little bit with Glass. I laugh when people who are familiar with Glass’s music – but not with the Etudes – say before a concert: ‘Oh, that must be easy music for you to play.’ I get a very different response from them afterwards!
PS: Did you record them in the same order they appear in the score? I read somewhere that Glass reordered the first set after completing it.
MC: No. I had actually thought of releasing them on the album in a different order to the way they’re numbered in the score, but in the end I decided that this might just be too confusing for listeners. There’s a part of me that wanted to showcase what the etudes had to offer outside of their set order because Glass has been so clear about Book 1 being the book that he wrote for his own personal practice, whereas Book 2 went in a completely different direction. That in itself is quite interesting. The question is, was it ever really meant to be twenty? I think it’s a project that just ‘took flight’ really, in a kind of organic way.
PS: Some of the etudes, especially the minor-key ones, sound like very personal statements, as if Glass is plumbing the depths of his emotions and feelings.
MC: I have a very strong personal connection to these pieces that has made me want to continue playing them. After hearing them for the first time in one of the Bang on a Can concerts in Massachusetts by the pianist Vicky Chow, I went on a bit of a road trip, visiting my family in Arizona then driving all the way up to San Francisco. While travelling through North America, I was listening a lot to Glass’s etudes in the car with my husband Dewi. They became a kind of soundtrack to that whole journey. The etudes have become connected in my mind to a certain time and place, and to certain emotions I experienced at that time. They’re very personal for Glass, but they’re also very personal to me, interpreting them. I sometimes wonder how those experiences shaped the way I perform the pieces, and how different my performance of these works would be had things happened differently. © 2024 Pwyll ap Siôn & Máire Carroll
Máire Carroll is a leading Irish pianist, composer, collaborator and teacher who has performed throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada, including performances at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the National Opera House in Tallinn, the Liszt Academy in Budapest and the Princess Grace Library, Monaco. As the first pianist in Ireland to be awarded the prestigious RDS Music Bursary, Máire maintains a diverse programme of solo and collaborative work, spanning repertoire from Baroque to the twenty-first century. Her passion and creativity for new music informs her interpretation of music from earlier periods. In 2022, Máire gave a complete performance of Philip Glass’s twenty Piano Etudes across two sold-out evenings at the National Concert Hall, Dublin.
Máire is the Artistic Director of Hidden Pianos, which she launched in 2018 with the aim of sharing classical and contemporary music through performance and narration in site-specific locations. Hidden Pianos has been featured on RTÉ Radio 1, RTÉ Lyric FM and in the Irish Times. Venues have included Dublin Port, Waterways Ireland, 14 Henrietta Street, Lighthouse Cinema, MoLI and the National Gallery of Ireland. Her solo composition Lavinia Fontana was commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland to celebrate the opening of the exhibition ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rulebreaker’ in 2023.
Excited by the music of today, Máire collaborates with composers both at home and abroad. She is a winner of the Bank of Ireland Begin Together Fund, and in 2025 will release an album, Sudden Changes, which will include five commissioned works for solo piano by living Irish composers – David Coonan, Amanda Feery, Anna Murray, Sam Perkin and Nick Roth. Máire also appears regularly with Ireland’s leading contemporary ensemble, Crash Ensemble, in concert and on recordings, and has performed with orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland), RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and many others.
Máire completed her doctoral studies at Trinity College Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), with research focused on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury piano études. Prior to this, she graduated with distinction from her MMus degree at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where she studied on scholarship with Christopher Elton and was awarded the 2016 Franz Reizenstein Award for outstanding achievement. Máire began her studies at the age of four, working with Gillian Smith and Dr John O’Conor at RIAM and later studying with Ray Keary and Hugh Tinney.
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