"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 presents the first recording of John Cages Europera 5, preceded by her reading Recollections of the Premiere Performance by Yvar Mikhashoff. This recording of Europera 5 was produced by Brian Brandt and released on the Mode Records label as Mode 36 in 1995, with performers Yvar Mikhashoff, Martha Herr, Gary Burgess, Jan Williams, and Don Metz. Europera 5 is the last and most diminutive of Cages operas " preceded by Europeras 1 & 2 (1984-1987) and Europeras 3 & 4 (1991) " and was instigated by pianist Yvar Mikashoffs desire for a small, more practical and portable, and more easily performed work in the series, which had its premiere in Buffalo at the North American New Musical Festival on April 12, 1991.
Laura Kuhn presents a live recording of John Cages performance of his Anarchy (1988) on the final day of John Cage at Wesleyan: A Festival/Symposium about John Cages Work and Influence, organized by his friend and colleague, Neely Bruce. Cages lengthy text piece brought together writings by such individuals as Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, Peter Kropotkin, Mario Malatesta, Michael Bakunin, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Norman O. Brown, and others, including bits of writings by Cage himself. Cage would go on to perform Anarchy several more times that year, in fairly quick succession " at the North American New Music Festival at SUNY Buffalo on March 14, at a Meet the Composer/Mid-America Arts Alliance Program on April 28, at the 8th Almeida Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance in London on June 19, and finally at Cooper Union in New York City on Nov. 9. Anarchy would be published in book form nearly a decade after Cages death, in 2001, by Wesleyan University Press.
To follow suit with last weeks program, we begin this weeks program with a letter on the subject, this time one written by Cage himself to his young student Christian Wolf, dated Jan. 17, 1974. Cage was 61 years old at the time of its writing.
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 093. EVERGREEN
John Cages Anarchy (1988)
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:10
1
Nov. 3, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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