Cage wrote
Etudes Australes for
pianist and friend
Grete Sultan, whom he had known since 1946. When Cage found out that Grete 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" (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 writing duets for independent hands, inspired by the way Sultan played. 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. 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. 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. Due to health problems, Cage himself was unable to prepare the manuscript; this was done for him by Carlo Carnevali (etudes I–VIII) and Wilmia Polnauer (etudes IX–XXXII). 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. 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. Also, in 1978 Cage wrote a small set of etudes for piano, or cello, or both together,
Etudes Boreales, which also utilized star charts as basic material. European critic
Heinz-Klaus Metzger was thrilled by the collection and told Cage that these etudes were composed not by Cage but by God, alluding to the stars from which the collection is derived. A critic for
The New York Times made a similar observation, suggesting that if
Etudes Australes were to last beyond Cage's life, they would do so because of the stars themselves. Negative reviews included, for example, one by
David Burge, pianist and piano professor at the
Eastman School of Music. Reviewing the then recently published edition of
Etudes Australes in 1977, Burge doubted the possibility of performance and wrote that "even if a performance were possible, ... it would be more interesting to look at, rather than listen to, this music." Today, the work is still controversial.
The Washington Post staff writer
Tim Page, writing 6 years after Cage's death, dismissed the work as "an interesting idea, but a lousy piece, as it would have had to be", whereas a review of
Steffen Schleiermacher's 2001 recording of the cycle in
The Guardian is more neutral and Jed Distler's review of the same record at Classics Today is very well-disposed towards the piece. ==Structure==