Etudes

Probably best described as musique concrete topologiqueor a kind of topological study of found musical soundthese etudes are re-writings of the music of Schumann, Couperin, Paganini, Sgambati, Brahms, and others. By placing these old pieces into a hall of mirrorsrevealing them upside-down and back to frontwe hear them all again, but as if for the first time. Listening here feels like going back to child-listening, when our ears did not quite understand the grammar of the music or the words of the songs we listened for, when we were not y et quite sure what to make of the many notes that just seemed to fly or flow. The etudes' creation lies between composition and performance; improvisation makes the next event sound as if the previous event were different. Some of the pieces neutralize harmonic functionality and flatten contrapuntal syntax into pattern alone, as if to be hearing the past in a radical present-tense. Others loosen, and then even lose, their motivic values, in an oddly resonant chordal confusionan uncanny recursion. Like the flight of Walter Benjamin's angelus novus, history is propelled into the future to which it's back is turned. Martin Scherzinger