Quatre études de sonorité [1996]

Pour les sonorités en resonance harmonique

Pour les sonorités en resonance accumulée

Pour les sonorities douces

Pour les sonorités fortes

The four studies by the young Chilean composer-pianist Andres Maupoint have more in common with the studies of Debussy than with those of Liszt. The Etudes de sonorité resemble Debussy’s Etudes not only in that each piece is devoted to a particular aspect of piano technique: the two works are more closely related in that Maupoint’s studies seem to be an extension of Debussy’s Pour les sonorités opposées, which is specifically concerned with the registration of different colours - although it is not, in fact, the only one of the Douze Etudes in which sound is of the first importance. What Debussy said of Pour les quartes - “It sets out in search of special sonorities and you’ll find unheard-of things in it” - Maupoint might well say of his Quatre études de sonorité.

Whether or not - after Stockhausen, Boulez, Messiaen, Nancarrow - there are still unheard-of things to be found in the piano, there are different ways of looking for them. Piano harmonics, obtained by soundlessly depressing certain keys and allowing the strings to resonate in sympathy with actual sounds produced elsewhere on the keyboard, have long been a source of fascination. In Pour les sonorités en resonance harmonique (“For sonorities resonating in harmonics”) Maupoint instructs the pianist to depress a cluster of ten notes at the bottom of the keyboard and to keep their strings open by holding down the third pedal until the end. This does not stop him calling for sophisticated effects with the sustaining pedal while projecting primary sounds in widely varied colouring, articulation and pitch against the open strings. Nor does it stop him postulating a series of lapidary themes in a coherent structural pattern.

Pour les sonorités en resonance accumulée (“For sonorities in accumulated resonance”) is an observation of what happens when different items of dissonant material - monodic, chordal, contrapuntal, violently percussive - mingle their components and accumulate their sonorities for as long as the sustaining pedal is applied. The longest piece of the four, Pour les sonorités douces (“For soft sonorities”) is a study in handfuls of chords articulated both molto legato and very quietly in the top half of the keyboard, crossed by the occasional dark shadow in the bass and at one point combined with a melodic line in the middle.

The last movement, Pour les sonorités fortes (“For loud sonorities”) resembles its predecessor only in its disguised allusions to the thematic material of the first movement. It is a heavily rumbling toccata, much of it in octaves at the bottom end of the keyboard, all of it - even in the brighter middle section - very loud or louder than that.