"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.
Composer Dean Rosenthal, a resident of Marthas Vineyard, where in 2012 he composed his ongoing international performance piece Stones/Water/Time/Breath, is guest today. This has become a popular piece, and in 2016, participants in 11 cities and 3 countries performed this work as part of the international Make Music Day festival, inaugurating an annual event that is now in its 7th year. Rosenthal describes the work as experimental music in which participants choose any body of water and using rocks (found in situ or brought for the occasion) perform a set of actions designed to create a musical performance. It was born from an impromptu performance Rosenthal himself enacted that was later written down as a set of performance steps that can be performed by everyone. As he further explains, In performance, participants, with or without musical training, are invited to explore and inhabit listening spaces that include sound, silence, and the environment. In solo performances, these spaces are evident; in ensemble performances, community becomes a feature of the expressive activity.
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. Episode 066. EVERGREEN.
Dean Rosenthal
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:36
1
May 12, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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