Etudes Australes

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The cover of the first recording of Etudes Australes features the star maps used to compose the piece and the rubber wedges necessary during the performance.

Etudes Australes is a set of etudes for piano solo by John Cage, composed in 1974–5 for Grete Sultan. It comprises 32 aleatoric pieces written using star charts as source material. The etudes, conceived as duets for two independent hands, are extremely difficult to play. They were followed by two more collections of similarly difficult works: Freeman Etudes for violin (1977–90) and Etudes Boreales (1978) for cello and/or piano.

[edit] History of composition

Cage wrote Etudes Australes for pianist and friend Grete Sultan. When Cage found out Sultan was working on his Music of Changes, a piece which involved hitting the piano with beaters and hands, he offered to write some new music for her, because to him "it didn't seem [right] that an aging lady should hit the piano"^[1] (Sultan turned 68 in 1974). Cage started working in January 1974 and finished the etudes in 1975.

The pieces are built on two basic ideas. The first is that of writing duets for independent hands. For this, Cage made a catalogue of what triads, quatrads (four-note aggregates) and quintads (five-note aggregates) could be played by a single hand without the other assisting it; overall some 550 four- and five-note chords were available for each hand. The second idea was to use star charts as source material, as Cage had already done with the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis in 1961 and with Song Books in 1970.^[2] This time Cage used the maps in Atlas Australis, an atlas of the southern sky by Antonín Bečvář, which he acquired in Prague in 1964.^[3]

The process of composition ran as follows. First, Cage put a transparent strip of about three-quarter inch over the maps. The width of the strip limited the number of stars used. Within this width Cage was able to discern the twelve tones of the octave. Then through chance operations using the I Ching, he transferred these tones to the available octaves for the left and right hands. The resulting notes reflect only the horizontal positions of the stars, and not all stars are used, because the maps used a variety of colors, and Cage's chance operations limited the choices every time to specific colors. In the end Cage would have a string of notes and ask the I Ching which of them are to remain single tones and which are to become parts of aggregates. In the first etude this question is answered by a single number, in the second by two numbers, etc. So as the etudes progress, there are more and more aggregates: in the first, most sounds are single tones, in the final, thirty-second etude, roughly half of the sounds are aggregates. The aggregates themselves were selected from the list of available aggregates, described above.^[4]

For Cage the resulting etudes represented certain political and social views. Collecting and using the aggregates for independent hands was particularly important, because according to Cage, it

permitted the writing of a music which was not based on harmony, but it permitted harmonies to enter into such a nonharmonic music. How could you express that in political terms? It would permit that attitude expressed socially. It would permit institutions or organizations, groups of people, to join together in a world which was not nationally divided.^[5]

Furthermore, the immense complexity of the music also had a social function. "I'm interested in the use of intelligence and the solution of impossible problems. And that’s what these Etudes [Australes] are all about"^[6]; and the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible."^[7]

Grete Sultan was enthusiastic about the prospect of Etudes Australes^[8] and recorded the complete cycle in 1978 (books 1 and 2) and 1982 (books 3 and 4). Cage had received letters from virtuoso pianinsts over the world expressing interest in the etudes; examples include Marianne Schroeder^[9] and Roger Woodward.^[10] For violinist Paul Zukofsky Etudes Australes signalled Cage's return to conventional notation, and he commissioned the composer to write a similar cycle for the violin. The result, Freeman Etudes (1977–80, 1989–90), took several years to complete, and at some point Zukofsky admitted the music was too difficult for him to perform. Also, in 1978 Cage wrote a small set of etudes for piano or cello, Etudes Boreales, which too utilized star charts as basic material.

[edit] Structure

Etudes Australes comprise 32 etudes grouped in four books of 8 etudes each. The pieces are arranged in order of complexity of the materials—single tones and aggregates—involved, from simple (etude 1, single tones) to complex (etude 32, potentially half single tones, other half aggregates). The music is written down on four staves, two for each hand; the hands are forbidden to assist each other. There are no barlines, and no traditional note values. Instead, there are just two types of notes: closed and open circles, the latter are to be held as long as possible. The chords are sometimes written with a stem; and tone clusters appear in later etudes, notated using vertical bars. Also, each etude includes several keys that are to be depressed prior to playing, and held down using a rubber wedge.^[11]

The beginning of Etude 8, Book I. (First recording by Grete Sultan, the dedicatee of the work: listen (help·info).) The top two staves are for the right hand, the lower two are for the left hand.

The pieces are notoriously difficult to play. The performer has to learn a specific technique to play "duets for two independent hands" (which even involves a particular sitting position^[12]); also, because both hands' ranges cover almost the entire keyboard, the hands are continually crossing.^[13] There are no tempi specified, no dynamics and no pedal indications; all of these are left to the performer to decide on. To facilitate matters somewhat, every etude occupies exactly two pages of the score, so there is no need to turn the page.^[11]

[edit] Editions

• Edition Peters 6816 a/b/c/d. (c) 1975 by Henmar Press. As of 2008, the score is only available for hire.^[14]

[edit] Recordings

Although individual etudes have appeared on compilations, the complete cycle has only been recorded three times. This section lists, in chronological order, only the complete recordings. Years of recording are given, not years of release. Catalogue numbers are indicated for the latest available CD versions. For the complete discography with reissues and partial recordings listed, see the link to the John Cage database below.

• Grete Sultan – 1978–82, Wergo WER 61522^[15]
• Claudio Crismani – 1994–96, Real Sound RS 953-0013^[16]
• Steffen Schleiermacher – 2001, MDG 613 0795-2^[17] (3CD, part of John Cage: Complete Piano Works 18CD series)

[edit] References

• Cage, John. 1979. Empty Words: Writings '73-'78. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819560676
• Cage, John. 1996. Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, edited by Joan Retallack. Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1996. ISBN 0819552852 (pbk); reprinted Hanover, NH:University Press of New England, 1997. ISBN 0819563110
• Dettmar, Kevin J. H. 1992. "'Working in Accord with Obstacles': A Postmodern Perspective on Joyce's 'Mythical Method'". In Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar,^{[citation needed]} Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472102907
• Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with John Cage. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93792-2
• Nicholls, David. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521783488 (cloth) ISBN 0521789680 (pbk)
• Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman. 1994. John Cage: Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226660567 (cloth) ISBN 0226660575 (pbk)

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Etudes Australes data sheet and discography at the John Cage database
• Examples from Cage scores, including two excerpts from two etudes from Etudes Australes (Japanese)