Etude and Fugue No. 1

The Etudes and Fugues were commissioned by Matthew Coley as part of my residency at the 2015 Heartland Marimba Festival and Academy. The set is just one of several pieces I’ve composed for Matthew over the last five or so years. I thought of the four etudes as an opportunity to not only challenge Matthew as a performer, but also for me to hone a particular compositional tool. Craft and technique are important aspects of my process, and I think of each new project as a chance to practice and improve. These etudes, being as short as they are, forced me to focus on one or two particular musical characteristics. The first etude is about constant activity and long-range control over register. The second and third etudes deal with the juxtaposition of conjunct and disjunct melodic patterns, and regular versus irregular rhythmic ideas, while the fourth etude focuses exclusively on smooth voice leading among sets of four or less pitches. Similarly, each etude presents the performer with a specific challenge. The first etude is a study in rapid fire virtuosity, the second and third explore stick independence and rhythmic accuracy, and the fourth focuses on tremolo technique. Like the fugues of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier the fugues of this set fall into one of two categories; a slower, more solemn, stile antico type (as with the first), and a faster, more dancelike style (as with fugues II through IV). The classical “rules” of fugue demand a very economical approach to melodic ideas (Schoenberg defined the form as “a composition with maximum self-sufficiency of content”). Much of my practice deals with squeezing the most juice from very small musical fruit, and so it was a both a joy and a real challenge to compose the most artful music from a single concise idea. Traditional contrapuntal techniques such as inversion and retrograde are used throughout, as are traditional key relationships, although the pitch materials are of a more contemporary variety.