A primary tenet in John Cage's philosophy lay in his desire to disengage his ego from the process of composition, and many of his works demonstrate his ingenuity in devising means of accomplishing that goal. In his Études australes, and in several other works from the 1970s, he lay starmaps over staff paper and let the location of stars and their relative spatial relationships determine pitches and their relative temporal relationships. The wide placement of the pitches over the keyboard makes it a work that does not fall ...
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A primary tenet in John Cage's philosophy lay in his desire to disengage his ego from the process of composition, and many of his works demonstrate his ingenuity in devising means of accomplishing that goal. In his Études australes, and in several other works from the 1970s, he lay starmaps over staff paper and let the location of stars and their relative spatial relationships determine pitches and their relative temporal relationships. The wide placement of the pitches over the keyboard makes it a work that does not fall easily under the fingers under any circumstances, but Cage's instructions make it even more demanding: the score is written on four staves, the top two (approximately the top half of the keyboard) for the right hand, and the bottom two staves (approximately the bottom half of the keyboard) for the left, with the stipulation that the hands not "help" each other by switching to each other's staves for especially wide leaps. That requirement makes it a piece of ferocious difficulty, an...
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