"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If youd like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org.
Laura Kuhn talks with Brian Brandt, who founded Mode Records with its first recording in 1984 of John Cages Etudes Borealis, in a 2-LP set. Brandt has long had the intention of recording all of Cages work, and at 54 volumes in its present Cage Edition, Mode has produced more commercial recordings of Cages music than any other label. Modes curated aspect is important and has led to a loyal following " this is not a label run by committee, but one built on Brians personal vision of producing fine recordings that are not necessarily a part of current mainstream musical fashion. We talk not only about both Brandt and Modes beginnings in the industry, but also about the many challenges facing the independent record producer today. And we listen to a bit of one of both of our favorite Mode releases " John Cages Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979; Mode 28/29, No. 6).
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his "Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage" (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book hed ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and theres John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 433, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.
Brian Brandt
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:39
1
April 8, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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