"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.
This All Things Cage features a documentary-fantasy entitled Arnold Schoenberg: The First Hundred Years, produced in 1975 for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by the celebrated Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould. For this broadcast, Gould separately interviewed the French musicologist and Gustav Mahler biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, composers John Cage and Ernst Krenek, conductor Erich Leinsdorf, and conductor-musicologist Denis Stevens about Schoenberg, his compositions, his impact on the future of music. Gould matched up fragments from each of the interviews with other conversational fragments or appropriate musical accompaniment, balancing voice and musical levels, carefully fading the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet into the Mahler Resurrection Symphony using the note G as a pivot. A few days later, in his office in downtown Toronto, Gould and engineer Don Logan pulled the proper switches to transform De La Grange, Cage, Krenek, Leinsdorf, and Stevens into the actors in his hour-long drama about the musical life of Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Schoenberg for a time in Los Angeles, and he remained faithful to him to the end of his life.
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 060. EVERGREEN
Arnold Schoenberg, The First Hundred Years
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:59:55
1
March 17, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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