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''Etudes Australes'' is a set of etudes for piano solo by John Cage, composed in 1974–75 for Grete Sultan. It comprises 32 indeterminate 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. ==History of composition== 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 () that an aging lady should hit the piano"〔Kostelanetz 2003, 91.〕 (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.〔Revill 1993, 247.〕 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.〔Nicholls 2002, 139.〕 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.〔Cage, jacket notes for ''Etudes Australes and Ryoanji'' (New York: Mode 1/2).〕 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.〔Descriptions of the method given in Kostelanetz 2003, 92, Nicholls 2002, 139, and also in Kostelanetz' jacket notes for ''Etudes Australes for piano (Complete)'', Wergo 60152/155. The latter are quoted in Dettmar 1992, 290.〕 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).〔Prefaces to Edition Peters 6816 a/b/c/d. (c) 1975 by Henmar Press.〕 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.〔 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 () are all about";〔Kostelanetz 2003, 298.〕 and the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible."〔Perloff and Junkerman 1994, 140.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Etudes Australes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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