"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.
Today's program for All Things Cage is the first of two that will focus on Cages time at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which formally began with the academic year 1960-1961 when Cage served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies. Well listen to Cages little-known Address to the Gentlemen of the Wesleyan Glee Club, as read by Laura Kuhn, our programs host, a delightfully whimsical piece composed and presented in 1960. At the end of Kuhns reading, well continue this programs spirit of storytelling with an extended excerpt from Cages Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, as performed by Cage and his formidable collaborator, David Tudor, recorded in the 1950s and released in a two-CD box set by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 1992.
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 081. EVERGREEN.
John Cage at Wesleyan University, Part 1: Cages Address to the Gentlemen of the Wesleyan Glee Club (1960)
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:23
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Aug. 11, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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