"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 Stephen Nachmanovitch, an improvisational violinist who works at the intersections of music, dance, theater, and multimedia arts. Born in 1950, Stephen graduated in 1971 from Harvard and in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Cruz where he earned a Ph.D.in the History of Consciousness for his exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. In the 1970s he was a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola, and electric violin. He has taught and lectured widely in the United States and abroad on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art, presenting masterclasses and workshops at conservatories and universities. Hes also made numerous appearances on radio and television and at music and theater festivals. He has collaborated with other artists across media, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology.
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 090. EVERGREEN.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:59:41
1
Oct. 13, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.