"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 presents the first recording of John Cages Europera 5, preceded by her reading Recollections of the Premiere Performance by Yvar Mikhashoff. This recording of Europera 5 was produced by Brian Brandt and released on the Mode Records label as Mode 36 in 1995, with performers Yvar Mikhashoff, Martha Herr, Gary Burgess, Jan Williams, and Don Metz. Europera 5 is the last and most diminutive of Cages operas " preceded by Europeras 1 & 2 (1984-1987) and Europeras 3 & 4 (1991) " and was instigated by pianist Yvar Mikashoffs desire for a small, more practical and portable, and more easily performed work in the series, which had its premiere in Buffalo at the North American New Musical Festival on April 12, 1991.
My impression is that the Beatles place is not so much in the world of serious music as it is in the world of revolution. I think that serious musicians would do well to follow their example in this respect. That is, I think our proper business now "whether were popular or serious if we love mankind and the world he inhabits" is revolution.
-- John Cage, from a letter dated Sept. 18, 1967, to Patricia Coffin, senior editor at Look magazine whose article Art Beat of the 60s: The Beatles appeared in the January 9, 1968 issue, complete with four pop-art color pinups by Richard Avedon.
In this weeks program, Kuhn covers virtually all of the ways that Cage is known to have interacted with The Beatles, both as individual musicians and with their music, delving into his Notations Project Collection from the 1960s, the proximity of Cage & Cunninghams living situation on Bank Street in NYC in the early 1970s with that of John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and the virtually unknown Carnival of Light, a 14-minute improvisatory track created by The Beatles in 1967. We listen to two realizations of Cages little-known composition entitled The Beatles, 1961-1970 for six pianos and tape (1990), as well as other works by composers who were invited to contribute to Aki Takahashis Beatles Project, which resulted in a series of beautiful CDs released by Toshiba/EMI/Angel in Japan.
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 110. EVERGREEN
Laura Kuhn Talks About John Cage and The Beatles
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:42
1
March 9, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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