"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.
James Pritchett is my first guest on All Things Cage who almost doesnt need an introduction, as hes the author of The Music of John Cage, published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, well known to Cage enthusiasts and still the only comprehensive survey of all of Cages music. But his earlier doctoral dissertation, The development of chance techniques in the music of John Cage, 1951-1956, completed in 1988 for NYU, is every bit as useful, being a detailed study of the processes Cage used in his seminal chance compositions. James and I talk a bit about his research at Cages NYC loft in the mid-1980s, and a lot about his latest project, writing the liner notes for a new CD due out in early summer from Mode Records that features a little-known arrangement by Morton Feldman of Cages Cheap Imitation for flute, glockenspiel, and piano. And, courtesy of Mode Records, well listen to a movement!
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.
James Pritchett
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:59:30
1
March 11, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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