"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 Overpopulation and Art (1991) at Stanford Universitys Here Comes Everybody: The Music, Poetry, and Art of John Cage on January 28, 1992, at which he made one of his last public appearances. When he set out to write this piece, he reached out to his friend Esther Ferrer with a question: What is the future of anarchy? Ferrers thoughtful reply is interwoven into Cages piece, a through-composed mesostic which is both unusually sensical and at times very funny. Kuhn also speaks of Cages Anarchy (1988), an earlier work evidencing his and Ferrers keen interest in the subject, as well as his Alla ricerca del silenzio perduto, known familiarly as Il Treno, a 1978 work for prepared train that traverses Bologna Cage composed in collaboration with Tito Gotti, Juan Hidalgo, and Walter Marchetti in which Ferrer participated as a performer. We listen to an excerpt of Il Treno at the close of our program, drawn from the beautiful Basterville Art Book complete with CDs and a DVD derived from the performances published in 2008.
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 122. EVERGREEN
John Cages Overpopulation and Art (1991)
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:52
1
June 1, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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