4 Etudes

Arc-en-ciel from Book 1 (1985)

Fém from Book 2 (1989)

Cordes à vide from Book 1 (1985)

Fanfares from Book 1 (1985)

Ligeti’s Etudes were inspired not by an ambition to create a new piano technique or to find new sounds in the instrument. No Stockhausen, he was guided by the nature of the piano as we know it. He developed his ideas at the keyboard – “I have to feel them out with my hand,”    he said – and he called for support on “the four great composers who thought pianistically, Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann and Debussy … A well formed piano work produces physical pleasure.” The actual working out of his ideas goes far beyond those models of course. From Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano music, for example, he learned rhythmic and metric complexity: “He showed that there were entire worlds of rhythmic-melodic subtleties that lay far beyond the limits that we had recognised in ‘modern music’ until then.” Alongside that are the varied influences of Central African polyphony, jazz pianism and, on the theoretical level, fractal geometry.

Arc-en-ciel, the fifth in the first of the three books of Etudes, is one of the most attractive of all 18 of them – partly, but by no means entirely, because of its allegiance to the textural qualities of two particularly admired jazz pianist, Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans. Headed Andante, con eleganza, with swing, it is more relaxed than any of its companions and it never quite loses sight of the expressive melody introduced in the opening bars, whatever metrical transformations it experiences. If the “Rainbow” title has any relevance it is in the arch form defined by the central climax rather than in its pitch organisation: far from coming back to the level at which it began, it disappears out of earshot at the far top end of the keyboard.

“Fém,” Ligeti has explained, “is the Hungarian word for metal, but it has a ‘brighter’ connotation, as the Hungarian word for light is fény.” Called at an early stage Quintes, it is indeed a study in fifths, but also in the bright metallic sound suggested by the present title. It is also characterised by the minutely calculated polyrhythms which set the two hands at odds.

They are brught together only at the brief ffff climax, just before the apparently slower coda which begins in the distance and dies out in the pppp closing bars.

Cordes a vide, as its allusion to the open strings of a violin suggests, is another study in fifths although, because of melody notes emphasised and extended in the at first prevailing quaver arpeggios, it is more lyrical. The note values are progressively decreased, however, until triplet semiquavers rise far up the keyboard to the fff climax, which is immediately followed by a muted sotto voce plunge to the opposite end of the piano range. Note values are again progressively diminished until the entry of a comparatively sustained melody sounding “like a horn from the distance.”

Fanfares is one of the few Etudes that overtly celebrate Ligeti’s Hungarian identity. A particularly brilliant piece, it is based on    Bartokian ostinato of 3 + 2 + 3 quavers which occur unfailingly, in one hand or the other, in every bar of the piece until they die out to nothing in the last few bars. Against the ostinato are thrust the fanfares which are expressed in a broader version of the 3+2+3 additive metre until their durations are altered with a widely fluctating dynamic level. Towards the end their not values are progressively lengthened in what sounds to the ear like a rallentando while the ostinato persists as before.