John Burge

Commissioner: The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Premiere: April 26 and 27, 2017 as part of the Bader-Overton Canadian Violin Competition held at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen's University, Kingston, ON.

Duration: 6 minutes

Movements:

1. Octaves
2. Interrupted Scales
3. Broken Chords
4. Fughetto
5. G String Melody
6. Syncopated Accents

Program note: Twitter Etudes No. 1, a short virtuosic work for solo violin by Canadian composer John Burge, was commissioned for the First Bader-Overton Canadian Violin Competition organized by the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in April 2017.  Serving as the required test piece for all the semi-finalists to perform, the work consists of six short etudes each of which limits the number of notes in each movement to just 140 distinctive attacks.  All the etudes are given a descriptive title as follows: Octaves, Interrupted Scales, Broken Chords, Fughetto, G String Melody and Syncopated Accents.  The composer really could not decide on the optimal ordering of the etudes and although they are printed in the order just listed, performers are encouraged to find their own ordering when performing the complete set.  In fact, the composer notes that playing the etudes in the reverse arrangement of the printed ordering is a great option.

John Burge is grateful to Tricia Baldwin, Director of the Isabel Bader Centre for both her vision and energy in establishing this event and for providing the opportunity to compose the test piece for the very first competition.  The competition was won by Yolanda Bruno and all of the semi-finalists' performances of this piece can be seen on YouTube.

Videos: The two days of semi-final rounds for the Bader-Overton Canadian Violin Competition were posted on Youtube and it is quite fascinating to watch the very different versions of these Twitter Etudes as many of the performers did reorder the movements and brought their own personalities and preferences to bear on their interpretations.  Below is the link to the YouTube pages but do note that the audio is slightly ahead of the video.  My comment on each YouTube page has a quick link to the start of the individual performances.

Bader-Overton Canadian Violin Competition Semi-Finals Day One:

1. Lucy Wang (Third Prize Winner) plays Twitter Etudes at 0:35:36
2. Ji Soo Choi plays Twitter Etudes at 1:32:04
3. Katya Poplyansky (Second Prize Winner) plays Twitter Etudes at 3:15:18

Bader-Overton Canadian Violin Competition Semi-Finals Day Two:

1. Yolanda Bruno (First Prize Winner) plays Twitter Etudes at 0:39:05
2. Dasol Jeong plays Twitter Etudes at 1:25:15
3. Ewald Cheung plays Twitter Etudes at 3:12:42
4. Esther Hwang plays Twitter Etudes at 4:07:03