Freeman Etudes

Details

In 1977 Cage was approached by Betty Freeman, who asked him to compose a set of etudes for violinist Paul Zukofsky (who would, at around the same time, also help Cage with work on the violin transcription of Cheap Imitation). Cage decided to model the work on his earlier set of etudes for piano, Etudes Australes. That work was a set of 32 etudes, 4 books of 8 etudes each, and composed using controlled chance by means of star charts and, as was usual for Cage, the I Ching. Zukofsky asked Cage for music that would be notated in a conventional manner, which he assumed Cage was returning to in Etudes Australes, and as precise as possible. Cage understood the request literally and proceeded to create compositions which would have so many details that it would be almost impossible to perform them. An example from one of the more difficult etudes follows:

In 1980 Cage abandoned the cycle, partly because Zukofsky attested that the pieces were unplayable. The first seventeen etudes were completed, though, and Books I and II (Etudes 1–16) were published and performed (the first performance of Books I and II was done by János Négyesy in 1984 in Turin, Italy{{cite web |author-link = John Cage |url-status = dead

Editions

• Edition Peters 66813 a/b/c/d. (c) 1981, 1992 by Henmar Press.

Notes

Sources

• Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with Cage, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. (cloth) (pbk)
• Pritchett, James. 1994a. "John Cage: Freeman Etudes", CD liner notes to: John Cage, Freeman Etudes (Books 1 and 2) (Irvine Arditti, violin), Mode 32. (Accessed 14 August 2008)
• Pritchett, James. 1994b. "The Completion of John Cage's Freeman Etudes". Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 2 (Summer): 264–70.

References

1. Cage, in a 1983 interview quoted in Pritchett 1994a.
2. Cage, quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 95.
3. Pritchett 1994a says "even faster than the three-second-per-measure tempo given as a probable maximum in the score", but Pritchett 1994b states on p. 265, "In the score of the ''Freeman Etudes'', Cage instructs the violinist to play 'as fast as virtuosity permits', and Arditti took that to mean 'as fast as possible', period."
4. Pritchett 1994b, 265.