"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 speaks with 40-year-old music historian Brent Reidy who was recently named director of the research libraries of the New York Public Library. This put him at the helm of four vast public research centers " the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center " with hundreds of employees and with roughly 47 million items within their combined collections. John Cages Music Manuscript Collection is a jewel within the holdings of the Performing Arts Library, of course, which Reidy visits weekly. As he told Dan Bilefsky, who broke the news of his appointment in The New York Times on 12/29/22, these intermittent pilgrimages to visit with John Cage help him to de-stress. At the close of the program, at Reidys request, we listen to Stephen Drury performing Cages Dream (1948), released by Catalyst (CD 09026 61980 2) in 1994.
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 127. EVERGREEN
Brent Reidy
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:02
1
July 13, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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