Études en série

Composed and recomposed for 7 years, Bill Hopkins’s Études en série is a monumental nine-part cycle for piano. First conceived as Études pour rien, the work began as a pedagogical project before evolving into a radical exploration of serial composition, pianistic possibility and musical form for the concert hall.

Shaped by Hopkins’s encounters with the composer Jean Barraqué and musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger, and deeply engaged with the writings and aesthetics of Samuel Beckett, the Études challenge conventional notions of both the étude and musical architecture. Rather than assigning a specific technical problem to each piece, Hopkins disperses the full range of contemporary pianistic challenges across the cycle, creating a work in which forms emerge, dissolve, overlap, and resist resolution.

Repeatedly revised and eventually completed in 1972, the cycle could, for Hopkins, only be fully realised as a whole - a work intended “to extend not only the performer, but composer and listener too.”

Prepared by pianist Nicolas Hodges over a period of more than 30 years, this landmark publication brings together the complete Études en série for the first time as the singular, expansive work that Hopkins ultimately imagined.