Cage (dead Souls Mc: Prospects #1)

Études australes is one of several large works Cage wrote during the 1970s by laying starmaps over manuscript paper and using the placement of the stars to determine the pitches. Cage used the I Ching to determine some of the other musical parameters but left the dynamic levels, attacks, and tempos to the discretion of the performer, and this has led to extraordinary diversity in the lengths of performances. The original recording by Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote the piece, lasts 169 minutes, Steffen Schleiermacher's version is 203 minutes, and the fastest, at 112 minutes, is by Claudio Crismani. That gives some perspective to the monumentality of this 2011 version by Sabine Liebner, which clocks in at 260 minutes.