"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.
Inspired by last weeks program, a conversation with the accomplished pianist and conductor, Stephen Drury, Kuhn opts to devote this weeks program to two other Cage works produced by Drury for a Mode Records release in 2000 " Etcetera (1973) and Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras (1985), both for orchestra enhanced by recorded sounds and one with the addition of inverted cardboard boxes turned musical instruments to augment the orchestral sounds. Drury is a long-time teacher at the England Conservatory of Music where he directs the amazing Callithumpian Consort. Both the New England Conservatory Symphony Orchestra and the Callithumpian Consort are featured on this recording " Mode Records 86, Cage Edition 21, Orchestral Works 2, featuring multiple conductors: Drury himself, Tamara Brooks, Charles Peltz, Marsha Hassett, and Laurie K. Redmer. This first recording of these two major orchestral works by John Cage was recorded under the composers supervision at the New England Conservatorys John Cage Festival in 1991.
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 101. EVERGREEN
Etcetera
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:34
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Jan. 5, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.