Episodic Etude

Original piano solo by Justin James
Level: Advanced - recital piece - 15 pages
🎧 Listen to 30s audio sample
 
This is something of a mosaic. While it inhabits something of the world of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, plus an assortment of romantics, it also contains some more contemporary harmonic texture. 
 
The melody line is the deep dive in this. This is about unbridled passion. Feelings overtaking reason, pointed in all directions. Youthful inexperience. We make mistakes and we learn. We yearn for more, but now is all we have. I wanted this piece to be emotion with an attention deficit, pushing the piece into a sort of harmonic naivety. A sort of fearlessness that prevents a secure beginning, middle and end. It’s about young love, old souls, a cruel world, the wild of heart and the hope and hopelessness of our condition. The hundreds of false starts we experience in our youth and through our twenties, set us up for a more stable future. They are the necessary life lessons, emotional and sometimes existential. Emotional growth is asynchronous melancholy at times. This etude is about the weeds growing strong between the crack in the pavement. Life is not what we force it to be. We can shape it by asking the right questions, refusing to be too dogmatic and gradually acquiring the knowledge to live well.
 
This piece is perfect for exams, recitals and emotive vide. It’s also for those that are studying and need a left hand etude to sharpen up their arpeggiation, enabling greater control to facilitate more complex accentuation and phrasing. It’s also the perfect study in effective pedalling. There is so much harmonic transition and tension continuously throughout, that pedal points will stand out if not secure. 
 
Dedicated to my friend and mentor Richard James Gill