Probably best described as musique concrete topologique- or a kind of topological study of found musical sound- these etudes are re-writings of the music of Schumann, Couperin, Paganini, Sgambati, Brahms, and others. By placing these old pieces into a hall of mirrors- revealing them upside-down and back to front- we 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 confusion- an uncanny recursion. Like the flight of Walter Benjamin’s angelus novus, history is propelled into the future to which its back is turned. (Martin Scherzinger)
