"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.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Laura Kuhn speaks to John Cages aspirational thinking and his incredible prescience, both captured beautifully in two text works well listen to tonight: we open with Cages reading of his Preface from Lecture on the Weather (1975) and close with his lesser-known adolescent Other People Think (1927), which he delivered representing Los Angeles High School at the Southern California Oratorical Society at the Hollywood Bowl in his native Los Angeles. Both are testimony, if such is needed, to Cages prescience and his compassionate sensibilities. We close with a snippet from his Second Construction (1940), composed at the start of World War 2, when Cage was grappling with a heavy heart about what it means to be a composer during deeply troubling times.
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.
On Aspiration and Prescience
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:17
1
Sept. 16, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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