Jihye Chang: Boston Etudes

Psychologically and emotionally crippling though the first months of the pandemic were, the times eventually gave way to creative work. When they did, pianist Jihye Chang, who teaches at Boston University, took advantage of the moment to commission a series of keyboard etudes from eight Boston-based composers that are now brought together on her new album.

Some of them seem to address the moment of their creation more forcefully than others.

Stratis Minakakis’ Three Etchings on Solitude, for instance, offers a turbulent study of sound and silence. Taking a Robert Lowell quote about Beethoven as its starting point, the writing is rumbling and often texturally murky. In this context, contrasting little details—quietly sustained pitches, sudden flourishes of notes, and the like—stand out strongly.

At times, William David Cooper’s Idée fixe consciously channels Brahms. Yet catching that reference isn’t mandatory: the music’s brooding, Berg-ish qualities come over clearly enough on their own. So does Cooper’s structuring of the whole—the etude’s closing section finds a fitting, if not entirely comforting, sense of resolution.

Meantime, John McDonald’s Fleetude is punching, urgent, and unsettled. So, though a bit less starkly, is Dan VanHassel’s A Bit of Noise in the System, with its play of bubbly arpeggios and sudden, dissonant attacks.

Eun Young Lee’s Nam-Ok Lee recollects the composer’s early piano lessons, with hazy textures suddenly morphing into formed fragments of melodies and chords. Yu-Hui Chang’s aphoristic Mind Stretch revels, too, sudden shifts of mood, character, and dynamics.

In between comes Ketty Nez’s belletude, a pulsing study in additive rhythms, and Marti Epstein’s bariolage. The latter, with its delicate, shimmering play of colors is enchanting.

Chang plays them all with an impressive sense of direction. Throughout, voicings are clearly delineated and her sense of musical character, as demonstrated in the sudden, impish ending of A Bit of Noise and the touching warmth of Idée fixe’s last pages, is assured.

— Jonathan Blumhofer, 12.15.2024

Two hundred years on from Schubert’s work, the desire to express emotion through music remains as strong as ever, and contemporary composers reach for connections through various forms and at various lengths. Pianist Jihye Chang commissioned a series of études from Boston-based composers during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and depredations of 2020-2021, and a New Focus Recordings release showcases her performance of eight of these works. Aside from being thoroughly immersed in contemporary compositional techniques, the pieces have little in common: the feelings they seek to evoke and explore are as disparate as the composers themselves. A Bit of Noise in the System by Dan VanHassel skitters up and down the piano amid quick punctuation-point notes and chords. Nam-Ok Lee by Eun Young Lee jumps about the keyboard in exploratory fashion. Mind Stretch by Yu-Hui Chang is a kind of mini-encyclopedia of sounds and techniques that tumble over each other willy-nilly, while belletude (spelled without a capital letter) by Ketty Nez sounds mostly like background material above which interjections appear, and bariolage (no capital there either) by Marti Epstein is delicate, evanescent and often sounds barely there at all. Fleetude by John McDonald is thoroughly disconnected from itself through stop-and-go pacing and fragmented themes whose emotions change in quicksilver fashion, while Idée fixe by William David Cooper is emotionally split in two with its comparatively rigid first portion and more fantasia-like second part. The longest work here is three pieces in one under the title Lowell Études: Three Etchings on Solitude by Stratis Minakakis. Full understanding of the material requires familiarity with the poetry of Robert Lowell, but listeners to whom contemporary musical approaches are appealing will have little trouble recognizing the many uses of extended techniques, such as juxtaposition of the piano’s extreme registers and an emphasis on the piano as a percussion instrument through pedal-performance participation rather than simple enhancement. Chang plays all the études as if she believes thoroughly in their emotive constructs and their composers' sound worlds. Like-minded audiences will enjoy this journey to, through and around Boston’s musical scene, although it is only fair to point out that nothing in the recital bespeaks any particular element of location except insofar as technical and emotional engagement themselves create individualized aural geography.

— Mark Estren, 2.13.2025

Beginning in 2016, South Korean pianist Jihye Chang, who teaches now as senior lecturer at Boston University, instituted an ingenious commissioning project titled “Continuum 88.” Each year Chang focuses her concert programs on a single musical genre, such as sonata, etude, and variations. A devoted performer of New Music, she is particularly interested in showcasing young composers. On this recording we hear a distinct project of hers, focusing on etudes, with eight commissions from eight Boston-area composers.

The booklet notes state no rules for these commissions, but the pieces are aligned with the traditional design of an etude: a short exercise illustrating a single idea or technique, with the understanding, I assume, that each composer was free to be creative within this broad outline.

The etude commissions spanned the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, a time of isolation as reflected in the fact that Chang met some of the composers for the first time on Zoom and generally worked at a distance prior to all eight works were played in concert in February 2022 before being recorded the following October.

The etude as a genre long ago escaped the purely pedagogical role it played with Czerny and entered a zone somewhere between virtuoso showpiece, advanced technical exercise, and character piece—all three features are prominent in the tradition set down by Chopin and Liszt.

Chang, who holds a master’s degree and doctorate from Indiana University Bloomington, had an expressed interest in virtuosity, which is the most exciting element of post-Chopin etudes, but I was curious to hear how much imagination might emerge in the balance of technical demands. Since these are world premiere recordings, the only way to do justice to every composer is to briefly sketch each piece, as follows:

The most schematic approach is heard in Dan VanHassel’s A Bit of Noise in the System, which began as an improvisatory idea for two pianos, each playing a different layer of music. As reduced for solo piano, the left hand plays a rapid Minimalist moto perpetuo of arpeggios while the right hand injects the periodic “noise” in the title, first as blips but building into more aggressive, clustered interjections. The demand on the pianist to keep the rapid pattern of arpeggios as even as possible is considerable. Chang plays both layers with exuberance and confidence.

Eun Young Lee cleverly devises a kind of non-etude inside the genre with Nam- Ok Lee, named after the piano teacher she had starting at age three. There is no single idea or technique here, because the basis is play, a child’s fingers wandering over notes, shaping some patterns and fragments of melody as she goes. A certain innocence is retained, but in reforming her experience so long ago, Lee has made the playful gestures into virtuoso-ready material. The overall effect, which could have been chaotic, is loose-limbed but charmingly evocative.

My expectation that Minimalism would play a prominent part was reinforced by Ketty Nez’s belletude, although the piece’s driven motion is rendered less repetitive by “rapidly shifting harmonies in shifting additive rhythms,” as Nez puts it. The effect is complex enough that Minimalism might be a misnomer— nothing is static, hypnotic or monotonous. What holds the listener’s interest is the rapid-fire gear changes, acting a bit like a film montage: Looped passagework never settles on a given gesture before jumping or sliding to the next. The scintillating impression is beautifully conveyed by Chang.

Another expectation, which almost every piece confirms, is finger-challenging speed. Mind Stretch by Yu-Hui Chang doubles down by adding very fast percussive tapping to the musical demands of her etude. The “stretch” consists of how alertly the pianist can switch from one mode to the other, which Jihye Chang accomplishes with ease. The overall effect has a jittery, twitching quality that remains within the bounds of a pleasing listen that focuses on the performer primarily.

The title of Marti Epstein’s bariolage, a musical term I hadn’t encountered before, is described in the composer’s note as “the string technique of playing one particular pitch or set of pitches on different strings.” It’s hard to see at first how bariolage could be imitated on a piano, or how a complete work could be built on it. Epstein uses very soft repetitions in narrow confines (a bit reminiscent of a piano tuner at work), resulting in a genuine etude, a study in rapid staccato. Imagination enters in the quiet of the intimate atmosphere the piece creates. Chang nicely exhibits the hushed virtuosity required.

New Music contains a broad streak of social concerns that John McDonald applies in the unlikely context of a piano etude, a genre that isn’t designed to carry the heavy freight of the concerns he poses in his composer’s note (an example: “Corporate totalitarianism, particularly in its delusional guise as ‘democracy’”). Setting the text aside, the musical effect of Fleetude is a jumpy, anxious depiction of what “we run into and from” without finding safe harbor. There are ping-pong syncopated passages that sound appropriately off balance amid an array of short, nervous gestures. Fleetude probably marks the furthest departure on the program from what I think of as an etude, but it is an effective, skillfully worked out collage.

The tension and obsessive brooding that Willaim David Cooper put into Idée fixe is very relatable to the pandemic, but the composition itself is complex, every note being directly or indirectly derived from the seven notes of the slow introduction. A quasi-sonata emerges, with a nod to Brahms’s First Piano Concerto at one point. The listening experience isn’t dissimilar to the intellectual density of post-Schoenberg piano writing in the 1950s and 1960s. The work’s quiet ending brings an air of welcome calm, but it must be conceded that the abstractness of Idée fixe requires concentrated attention.

The spareness of Stratis Minakakis’s three-part Lowell Etudes speaks for itself. These “etchings of solitude” were inspired by the poetry of Robert Lowell in two particular places where he evokes the solitude of late Beethoven and then the experience of eating out alone at a small white table in a restaurant. All three etudes are constructed of isolated notes and chords, but a little more explication would be needed to explain the presence of a humming tone (presumably the pianist’s voice) and clumping percussive sounds that might be made by the pianist’s feet. In any event, Lowell Etudes creates a lonely atmosphere that feels like jabbing against despair, a suitable mood to come out of the pandemic.

I didn’t mention the low expectations I had considering the limitations of etudes when they aren’t produced by geniuses—countless modern attempts have been made that were immediately forgotten. Happily, that isn’t the case here. This is an engrossing program that showcases admirably imaginative music from every composer. Few works are challenging or forbidding, so there is ample room for enjoyment by general listeners. Since this is a digital release, my descriptions might aid someone looking for a specific download or stream. In every respect Jihye Chang is the perfect vehicle for so many diverse ideas, all of them approached with faultless technique and a genuine sense of presence.

— Huntley Dent, 5.01.2025