"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 talks about John Cage and Improvisation, a topic of much interest to Cage aficionados. She draws from Cages first and only performance of a little-known work titled "How to Get Started," conceived in 1989 for Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music, sponsored by Bay Area Radio Drama and held at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, California. "How to Get Started" came together almost as an afterthought " a performance that would substitute for another that had been previously planned. It grew out of an altercation Cage had a week earlier with the composer Anthony Davis during Daviss presentation at Composer-to-Composer in Telluride, Colorado, wherein Cage essentially dismissed the usefulness of improvisation. This didnt go well, as one might imagine, and Cage was haunted by his remarks throughout the conference and into his travels to California for the Sound Design conference at which he was scheduled to speak.
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.
John Cage and Improvisation, Part I
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:01
1
July 29, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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