etude for flore

Flore Wiener is the daughter of two great friends of Reddy and his partner Heike Asmuss, Michael and Isabel Wiener, and was a one-time partner of Philipp Eden. Reddy worked on clazz etude no. 3 for philipp and etude for flore simultaneously, and thought of combining them, but they eventually became separate works. They are both phenomenally difficult, almost conceptual in nature, and a later work that he wrote for the pair, berceuse for filip and phlore was, indeed, originally entitled ‘diabolical variations’ and is virtually impossible to play, but fascinating to study.

His etude for flore is the least diabolical of the three works, perhaps because he submitted it to NewMusicSA, the South African International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) section, for consideration at the following World Music Days. (It was not chosen. There is brief e-mail correspondence between Reddy and then NewMusicSA chairperson, Chris Walton in the Surendran Reddy Archive.) The final Sibelius file, which has a few more instructions about the improvisatory passages, is ‘74 rev 4 iscm 30.7.2007 11.48am’, and this is taken as the most authentic source. It is slightly reformatted here to ensure that everything on the score is legible and the first page is shown on the right.

The final print-outs of these later works are beautiful as publications – printed under the name ‘Dorothy Publications’, the private imprint that Reddy and Asmuss created – with beautiful cover pages that Reddy designed. This one says, ‘etude pour flore’ and he gave himself a more exotic spelling, ‘sûrendran rédi’. This cover page is reproduced here, with kind permission of Heike Asmuss. The audio file below is exported from this Sibelius file.