Several expeditions into the Los Padres National Forest, where the last wild condors lived, led him to make his first attempt at "nature music" — a cycle of pieces entitled "songbirdsongs".
Here's what I mean, in perhaps one of the most succinctly powerful pieces of notation ever conceived: the instructions for Paragraph 7 of The Great Learning, that huge cycle of pieces that Cardew wrote based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound.
In fact, Kurtág builds whole cycles of pieces from these small shards, like his blistering Kafka-Fragments for violin and soprano, a 40-movement song-cycle of unflinching emotional and existential rawness, or the 12 Microludes for String Quartet, each a shred of pure musical extremity: violence or stasis, complexity or simplicity.
Both are part of Klang, the cycle of 24 pieces, one for each hour of the day, on which Stockhausen was working at the time of his death.
On 19 June, he's playing Messiaen's great Catalogue d'Oiseaux from dawn to dusk at various locations in the Suffolk countryside, while a week later he's taking part in a performance of Bartók's cycle of teaching pieces, Mikrokosmos.
Most notable is his Triakontameron (1920), a cycle of 30 pieces.
Liszt's cycle of 12 pieces – full title Etudes d'exécution transcendante and more often played individually – count among the most fiendishly virtuosic of all piano compositions.
No Longer Lazy He is lazy no longer, having introduced several works, including "True Life Stories," a cycle of piano pieces by the gritty British composer Mark Anthony Turnage.
This was the American premiere of "Nine Rivers," an audacious cycle of nine pieces interlinked by what Mr. Dillon calls musical tropes, lasting about three and a half hours.
Madrigal comedy, Italian musical genre of the late 16th century, a cycle of vocal pieces in the style of the madrigal and lighter Italian secular forms that are connected by a vague plot or common theme.
BEETHOVEN STRING QUARTETS New York has suffered no lack of complete cycles of these pieces of late: the Metropolitan Museum has presented one in each of the last two seasons.
