ETUDES POUR PIANO - premier livre（2016）

From the aspect of a composer，I thought about technique for the piano，which is the closest instrument for me，and I filled these etudes with my ideal pianism. In the first piece Groove，a small motif is repeated again and again and its pulse is gradually changed. The second piece Echoes is a sort of game in the silence coming after clusters played in extremely high and low registers in forte. The third piece Scanning Beethoven，commissioned by pianist Noritaka Ito，started from chromatic passages like cascades and little by little the chorale variations of the second movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata make appearances. In the forth piece Harmonies，the motif called horn fifths in Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata appears over and over as harmonic sequence like passacaglia with middle F sounded persistently. In the fifth piece Infinite Stairs，I attempted to make an aural illusion like an optical illusion of Escher’s lithograph in which you go down the stairs but end up at the same place. The motion of sound is the subject of this etude in which a motif of descending figure is endlessly repeated and gradually goes down and up the register. The sixth piece Sonnet for Lek & Sowat closes ?tudes pour Piano Premier Livre. This work was written during my stay at the Villa Medici and performed for the first time by myself at the salon of the Villa Medici. The Villa Medici is the base of the French Academy in Rome and composers such as Berlioz，Bizet and Debussy once stayed there. Written these etudes，I tried to translate a painting，the geometric photo of architecture with incidental calligraphy，by my colleague whom I met in the academy into music.