year of composition: 2008/20/21
playing time: 1'35''

The composer, cellist and music teacher Franklin Cox, born in 1961 in Charleston, Illinois, is one of those musical artists who, despite all post-modern relativizations, adhere to the idea of musical progress and unwaveringly search for new compositional and instrumental possibilities. Consequently, Cox's compositions - predominantly chamber music - tend towards extreme complexity. The 1st piano etude Aer from the cycle "Transcendental Etudes for Piano" (in landscape format with spiral binding), recently published by Gravis, is a perfect example of this.

The attribute "transcendental" is a clear reference to Liszt's "Études d'exécution transcendante", but even more so to Brian Ferneyhough's "Etudes transcendentales", in which the technical requirements for each instrument of the chamber ensemble are taken to the extreme in the most advanced tonal language of the 20th century. The desire to explore the limits of playability is also evident at every turn in Cox's Etude. Although the 28-bar composition consists solely of a series of thirty-second figures running in rapid counter-movement, no two of them are alike. The fact that the interpreter should be led to his limits and ideally exceed them is, of course, part of the aesthetic program of the "New Complexity" movement, of which Franklin Cox is one of the leading representatives. Anyone who wants to tackle Franklin Cox's etude, which is still awaiting its world premiere, should therefore have very nimble fingers and a willingness to cross boundaries. We are already looking forward to the result.

- Review by Robert Nemecek, in: PIANONews 3-2023. With friendly permission.

Extremely virtuoso, compositionally complex contemporary music in the tradition of Franz Liszt's "Études d'execution transcendante", which combines the idea of the étude with a consistently elaborated cyclical structure.

The études each develop a technical-musical problem along a single-movement form; they are conceived as sections of a four-part "core cycle", which can be supplemented by further piano pieces.

Complexly notated textures in which multi-layered rhythmic-metric event sequences are superimposed and interlaced with one another; differentiated pedal and articulation indications ...

The special attraction of the etudes lies in their versatility in the form of virtuoso individual pieces, as components of a cycle with four sections that merge into one another or as parts of a broader context.

- Review by Stefan Drees, in: nmz 11/23, page 10. With friendly permission.