Étude avant l’arrêt du temps

About Étude avant l’arrêt du temps

In honor of the centenary of Claude Debussy’s death, 2018, the pianist Mark Robson invited twelve composers to write short responses to Debussy’s twelve piano études. I’m glad to have been invited, alongside composers Juhi Bansal, Daniel Rothman, Sarah Gibson, Karl Kohn, Bruno Loucharan, Vera Ivanova, Thomas Kotcheff, Anne LeBaron, Robert Gates, Vicki Ray, and Robson himself.

Mark assigned me Debussy’s étude pour les notes repêtées, number nine in the set. After spending quite a bit of time with the piece, which tends to race by, I discovered that I consistently wanted to slow down and spend time with each of Debussy’s unbelievably beautiful harmonies, which are so easy to miss in the original étude. As such, I have collected my favorites from the piece, and invite the pianist or pianists to find their own way through a small maze of them.

I’d love to do an installation version of this piece someday. If you open this page in multiple windows and hit play in each of them at different times, and listen on headphones, you can start to hear how that might work.