"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.
Laura Kuhn talks with Rene Levine Packer, whose lengthy career has included such positions as administrator with Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp and co-director with Jan Williams and Morton Feldman of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo, as well as a director of the Contemporary Music Festival at the California Institute of the Arts. She was a director of the Inter-Arts program at the N.E.A., producer of Steve Reich and Beryl Korots multimedia opera, The Cave, and a dean at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Rene has produced two important books in the last decade: in 2010, This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo, published by Oxford University Press, an insider chronicle of an exuberant time of artistic exploration and experimentation populated by now such legendary figures as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Terry Riley, Julius Eastman, David Tudor, and others, and, in 2015, with co-editor Mary Jane Leach, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, published by the University of Rochester Press, a collection of biographical and musical essays. We speak primarily, however, about Renes present undertaking " a third book, this one about the late American philanthropist and photographer, Betty Freeman. At the close of tonights program well listen to a few movements from Cages Freeman Etudes as performed and recorded by Irvine Arditti and dedicated to none other than Betty Freeman.
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 128. EVERGREEN
Rene Levine Packer
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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July 20, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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