Twelve Studies

For Piano


Commentary
Recording
Related text
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Commentary

Despite my great interest in the composition of pedagogical music, as a result of my collaboration, between 1992 and 2000, as Technical Advisor to the Department of Music and Performing Arts of the Ministry of Education for the regulatory development of Music teaching within the framework of the LOGSE (Law of General Organization of the Educational System), and having composed a large number of original pieces and arrangements for various instrumental groups, I did not write any didactic work dedicated to the piano during that period, since the only one I had written (the Seven pieces) dates from 1987, thus being prior to my time as a teaching advisor.
Perhaps for this reason, at the beginning of 2011 I began the composition of a series of piano studies whose technical difficulty would allow them to be worked on during the different courses of the Professional Degree of the instrument; that is to say: with a good command of the basic technique of the piano and with a fairly extensive background of the main musical aspects of interpretation, all acquired during the first six years of study.
With the aim of enriching the didactic repertoire of this training period, I began to work on a cycle of studies, assuming the "formal" meaning of the term: an autonomous piece, not too extensive, focused almost exclusively on working on a beforehand proposed difficulty (those of Chopin, saving all distances, are the highest model of the genre), but in which the problem to be solved was not only technical, but also interpretive (work with the dynamics, the agogic, the phrasing, the different sound planes, etc.). The set grew in this way for a couple of months until reaching the number of twelve small pieces of these characteristics, thus acquiring both its definitive form and the title of the collection.
These Twelve Studies were written under the influence of a very special emotional situation, coinciding with the first steps of my relationship with Pilar Sanz, whom I married five years later. And despite the fact that music reaches where words cannot, on this occasion it seemed to me that the sense of each piece lacked a meaning that needed to be expressed in writing. That is why each study is preceded by a short poem, whose objective is none other than to create (or suggest) the appropriate state of mind for its interpretation.

The titles of each of the Twelve Studies are as follows:

I. Canción de cuna (Cradle song)
II. Crece y mengua (Wax and wane) (2+3+4+5+4+3+2)
III. Cabeceando (Plunging)
IV. Nieve (Snow)
V. Adivinanzas (Riddles)
VI. Carta de (des)amor (Homenaje a Felix Mendelssohn) ([Dis]love letter [Tribute to Felix Mendelssohn])
VII. Perlas y penas (p y f) (Pearls and sorrows [p and f])
VIII. Legatissimo
IX. Marcha (March)
X. Scherzo para un duende (Scherzo for an elf)
XI. Invención (Invention)
XII. Epílogo (Epilogue)

Once completed, the fingering of the Twelve Studies was reviewed by Ana Benavides, a pianist especially interested in the pedagogical repertoire, who in 2021 made a recording of them, along with the Siete pieces and the Lindaraja Prelude (2017). This recording was included in the CD "Diálogos concertados", from the Bassus Ediciones label, together with pedagogical pieces by Manuel Carra, who was my teacher of the Intermediate Piano Degree at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid at the end of the 1970s.
The edition of the Twelve Studies has a cover designed by Paula Villanueva Sanz.

Recording (selection of the CD "Diálogos concertados", by Ana Benavides)

I. Cradle song



V. Riddles



VI. (Dis)love letter (Tribute to Felix Mendelssohn)



X. Scherzo for an elf



XI. Invention

Related text

Manuel Carra and José Luis Turina, two essentials
By José Luis Temes
Notes to the booklet of the CD Diálogos Concertados by Ana Benavides - 2021
Listening to the album proposed by Ana Benavides today is musically delightful and musicologically essential. Delightful for being based on a repertoire of pure enjoyment, simple in the most beautiful sense of the expression. And essential because these pieces offer us the unpublished character of two Spanish musicians of the present, admired for different sides of their practice that those presented here.
[...]
Carra shares the protagonism of this album with José Luis Turina, his friend of almost half a century. And if the didact Carra has shown us his composer's side, it is now the composer Turina who shows us his didact's side.
There are more than a dozen formidable works for the virtuoso piano in José Luis Turina's catalog, which also includes other works not designed for the concert hall, but for classroom learning. But such is their beauty and perfection within the limits that Turina imposes on himself that Ana Benavides has done very well to convince the composer to be a part of her international record publication.
The Siete piezas that open the album are from 1987 and are dedicated to his son Luis. Despite the pedagogical will of each one of them, not all of them are of elementary difficulty. The habanera that flies over Los pasos perdidos is masterful; sweet the archaic counterpoint variation -the teaching of Francisco Calés, from which so many musicians of our generation have benefited!- on the theme of the cat from Peter and the Wolf (in the first piece, Glosa). And the lesson in harmony that Turina gives us in Canción de cuna, probably the «prima inter pares» of this collection, is masterful.
Nor would we be exaggerating if we were to say that each of the Doce estudios para piano, from 2011, is a little gem. Twelve delights, each preceded by a brief illustrative poem by Turina himself (the only Turinians that those of us who follow and admire him have been able to read; there is nothing more exciting than this still unknown side of the composer). If Nieve is a perpetual movement of sweet poetry, a new Canción de cuna is one of almost contemplative stasis; if Legatissimo is a study for the practice of said articulation, Invención proposes with success in its subtle objective a rereading of 18th-century harpsichord literature. This collection of studies is dedicated also successful in its subtle purpose "to Pilar Sanz".
Not specifically didactic, but dedicated to a young pianist is his Preludio de Lindaraja (which takes its name from one of the Alhambra patios, which also inspired composers such as Debussy and Albéniz). It was composed in 2017 for the Madrid pianist Luis González Lladó. The listener does not perceive -or at least we do not detect it- the Andalusian evocation in these staves. Rather, a generating cell, concrete and evanescent at the same time, that Turina repeatedly raises, but without actually specifying or glossing over it.
The composer side of a great pianist like Manuel Carra; and the less known didactic pianism of a creator like José Luis Turina make this album, in addition to being very beautiful, essential for those of us who love Spanish music of the most recent decades. Reaching us through the hands of a pianist like Ana Benavides guarantees its enjoyment. Great music, indispensable as a story, and delightfully played. Could anyone else give us more?

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