Etude No. 2

Etude No. 2 opens with a flowing, arpeggio-like melodic idea that repeats and subtly shifts, characteristic of Glass's minimalist language, where small changes accumulate gradually rather than through sudden contrast. The piece moves through two broad sections, a melodic idea, and a more chordal passage where block harmonies replace the running figuration, giving the ear a different kind of motion to follow after the first idea has settled in. Listen for the way small rhythmic or harmonic details shift almost imperceptibly from one repetition to the next, so that a pattern that sounded simple at the outset feels different by the time it returns. Because the music rarely pauses for a dramatic event, the experience rewards close, patient attention to texture and pulse rather than waiting for a traditional climax; when performed by an ensemble rather than solo piano, the same patterns pass between instruments, adding color without changing the underlying idea.

Philip Glass composed his Etudes for solo piano over more than two decades, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing through 2012, eventually completing a set of twenty. He wrote the earliest etudes partly to build his own piano technique and partly as compact studies in the repetitive, cumulative style he had spent his career developing in larger works like Einstein on the Beach and his symphonies. Etude No. 2, among the earliest in the set, dates from the mid-1990s and has become one of the most frequently performed and recorded of the twenty, taken up by pianists well beyond the new-music world and, as here, sometimes heard in ensemble arrangements.