"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.
Aaron Larget-Caplan is an international recording, touring, and guitar virtuoso, one of those rare musicians who can seamlessly move between and among baroque, classical, and contemporary music in a single performance. He first came to my attention through his stunning 2018 CD entitled JOHN. CAGE. GUITAR, which contains arrangements of seven works by John Cage, composed between 1933 and 1950, all originally for piano or prepared piano: A Room, Three Easy Pieces, Chess Pieces, Dream, Six Melodies, In a Landscape, and Bacchanale.
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.
Aaron Larget-Caplan
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
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Feb. 4, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.