Talk:List of étude composers

Latest comment: 10 years ago by Jerome Kohl in topic Barraqué

Omission edit

Why no Hanon or Czerny? Regwik (talk) 20:46, 26 December 2011 (UTC)Regwik 26.12.2011Reply

Ordering edit

Wouldn't it be better to sort études by date of composition, rather than their authors' birth dates? Toccata quarta (talk) 07:55, 19 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Spelling edit

Can I just please point out that there is no such word as etude. Not in any language.

In French there is the word étude (cap. Étude). This has NOT become absorbed into the English language in the same way that café has, for example. The English word cafe has lost its accent (and so have debut, premiere, role and many others, for that matter). Étude is not in this category. If you don't want to use an accent, there's always the fine English word study. But if you want to stick with étude, you're misspelling it if you don't include the accent. -- Jack of Oz [Talk] 17:02, 8 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Barraqué edit

Barraqué's Étude for tape is indeed an étude in name, but is it also an étude in a musical sense? Études are meant to be played (since they are supposed to be exercise pieces). What do others think? Toccata quarta (talk) 06:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

As the editor who added Barraqué to the list (and also Schaeffer, Boulez, Ferneyhough, and Stockhausen), my opinion must be obvious: If it is an étude, then it belongs in this list. However, you raise an interesting point: is an étude "meant to be played", just because it is an "exercise piece"? Perhaps the article Étude needs to be corrected, because in the early days of electronic music a rather substantial body of literature was created under this title. In electronic music (at least in those days), "performance" was a process carried out in the studio, and was usually called "realization". Although we ordinarily think of this as something that produces an immutable sound object, it is nevertheless true that the enshrined recordings are often only one performance from amongst many. In the exceptional cases, such as Henri Pousseur's Scambi, we may judge the skill of various studio performers, In what way does this differ from the concept of an étude for any other medium? On the other hand, if we have a sound definition for "étude" that excludes electronic music, should we then contact all those composers and tell them they must change the titles of their compositions, because they didn't adhere to our rules? I'm sure that Boulez, at least, would have a suitable response to such a demand.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
The lead of this article already has a definition, which, in my opinion, would exclude Barraqué's Étude for tape from this list. But obviously what you write could also be incorporated into the lead here. Toccata quarta (talk) 17:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
It does seem to me that there are problems with the lede here, on several grounds. At the moment, I believe it does reflect the article "Étude" but, as I have already said, I think that article plainly needs rectification. This is particularly true for the 20th century where, for example, as the Oxford Companion to Music says, "studies continued to be written both for professional concert use and for private amateur practice; of course, they can be for any instrument, or even for the voice or orchestra. … Stravinsky wrote one for pianola, which he later orchestrated; other orchestral examples have been contributed by Henze, Rawsthorne, and Milhaud". I have added these, and a few others, to this list. While the subject is open, I notice that caprices for the violin and for the cello have been added to this list, on grounds that they "might as well be called études". Shall we add caprices by other composers, as well (e.g., Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra), and perhaps other genres that might also be regarded as études or studies (e.g., Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Solfeggietto, or J. S. Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions)? Or should we be drawing a line here?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)Reply