"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 talks with pianist Margaret Leng Tan, long established as a major force in the American avant-garde and renowned as a John Cage interpreter. We feature two recordings of Cages early works: Primitive (1942), for solo string piano, and Suite for Toy Piano (1948), originally used by Merce Cunningham for his choreographic piece, Diversion. Leng Tan speaks about Cages role in the development of her career in general and of their personal relationship, and of Cages influence upon her path as a performer. Most recently, Margarets brought forth Dragon Ladies Dont Weep, a sonic self-portrait combining spoken and recorded text, projected images, and original music for prepared piano, toy piano, toys, and percussion by her long-time collaborator, Erik Griswold. Its been described as an evocative exploration of memory, time, control, and loss. Her performance was heralded by one reviewer as a delicate, compelling balance between play and performance, while another reviewer reported that the audience sat entranced by the surreal, the beautiful, the delicate, the obsessive and simplicity of a world gone madpushing us to think differently about things that we take for granted and dont question. This is Margarets first fully-fledged foray into theater, making it all the more impressive that Dragon Ladies Dont Weep has won Work of the Year (Dramatic) in the Australian 2021 Art Music Awards presented by AORA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre. It is dedicated to John Cage and Margaret Leng Tans mother.
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 043. EVERGREEN
Margaret Leng Tan
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:33
1
Nov. 18, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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