"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, Director of the John Cage Trust, talks with Lisa Pearson, publisher of Siglio Press, and artist Richard Kraft, one of two co-editors of the first complete edition of all eight parts of John Cages Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), released by Siglio in 2015. This was an extraordinary idea turned into an extraordinary book: a completely new chance-determined edition of all 8 parts, one with not only changing fonts as we see parsed out across Cage books published by Wesleyan University Press but also changing colors, as we see in the Great Bear Pamphlet that featured Part III of Cages Diary, published by Something Else Press in 1967. Co-editors Richard Kraft and Joe Biel executed all of the necessary chance operations using Cages practices as a guide. This book was nearly synchronous with The Selected Letters of John Cage (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), which Kuhn edited. As both volumes contain references to and reflections upon things both sublime and mundane, Cages correspondence when coupled with his complete Diary is really the closest thing we have to an autobiography by John Cage.
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.
Lisa Pearson and Richard Kraft
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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April 1, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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