"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.
ll Things Cage continues its break from its usual conversational format to allow for an introductory program that takes a closer look at Cages composition 33 1/3, scored for 12 turntables, 21 stereo amplifiers, 12 pairs of speakers, any 300 LPs, and the audience as participant performers. It was first performed at the University of California, Davis on Nov. 21, 1969 during Cages one-semester residency there, part of a larger, day-long event entitled Mewantemooseicday. This is introductory in the sense that Kuhn will talk next week, on July 3, with Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison College in Fort Myers, Florida, about his curation of 33 1/3 for the Tampa Art Museum in 2012. Unlike Cages first performance, wherein which LPs were made available to be played was chance determined by the owner of a local record store, Dellinger invited his performers, most very well known in the music world, to contribute their own favorites. A big difference, to be sure, and yet another example of what John Cage is doing now!
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 108. EVERGREEN
John Cages "33 1/3"
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:55:24
1
Feb. 23, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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