"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.
Every now and then I have the pleasure of introducing someone well versed in John Cages music to a composition previously unknown. Such was the case this past week, in conversation with the marvelous musician Aaron Larget-Caplan, who has made really beautiful transcriptions of various works by Cage for classical guitar. Have a listen to his 2018 CD for Stone Records, entitled John.Cage.Guitar, which includes Cages Dream, 6 Melodies for Violin & Keyboard, Bacchanale, In a Landscape, and A Room. On the subject of Indian music, I asked whether he knew Cages Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas, the last piece in Volume I of his Song Books (1970). Aaron didnt know it and promptly bought the recording, obtained the score, and fell in love! What he heard was Amelia Cunis incredible realizations, which were released on CD well over a decade ago (2007) on the Other Minds label (OM 1010-2). Im going to play a few of Cunis ragas, introducing them by reading from Cunis extremely informative liner notes.
Other Minds, an organization dear to the heart of the John Cage Trust, describes itself as a global New Music community where composers, students, and listeners discover and learn about fine innovative music by composers from all over the world. Check out their website " otherminds.org " for info about their Archives (radiom.org), broadcasts and podcasts, live events (including its essential Annual Festival), and records, this last a select catalog of contemporary music exploring areas seldom touched by mainstream institutions. Its co-founders are Charles Amirkhanian, a composer of sound poetry and electroacoustic music and a longtime broadcaster on KPFA Radio (1969-1992), and Jim Newman, the legendary founder of San Franciscos first serious art gallery of the modern era, Dilexi (1959-1970), and producer of experimental television programs and films on music and the visual arts.
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 119. EVERGREEN
Amelia Cunis renditions of 18 Microtonal Ragas from Cages Solo for Voice 58 (Song Books, 1970)
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:55:57
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May 11, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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