"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.
Last week Laura Kuhn talked with Rob Haskins, an American musicologist, critic, performer, and old friend who serves as a Professor of Music at the University of New Hampshire, having joined the faculty in 2004. Haskins has written extensively about John Cage, and we spent virtually all of our time talking about his Anarchic Societies of Sounds: The Number Pieces of John Cage, a re-working of his doctoral dissertation published in 2009 by VDM Verlag, the first book devoted to the subject of Cages last series of works, the so-called number pieces, distinguished by their number titles and making use of Cages late-life, groundbreaking time-bracket notation. We chatted at such length, in fact, that we had no time at all for music, so this week we make up for it by simply listening to two works from the extraordinary 4-CD box set from Another Timbre (at178x4) entitled John Cage Number Pieces (2021). We listen first to Ten (1991), scored for violin, piano, cello, oboe, flute, viola, percussion, violin, clarinet, and trombone, in its entirety, followed by a lengthy excerpt from Eight (1991), scored for brass and woodwind instruments. These are subtle, sublime pieces, performed with meticulous attention and care by the celebrated ensemble Apartment House, just two from the total of 16 works that are featured on this box set. The set also includes a 44-page booklet containing extensive liner notes by Simon Reynell alongside the CDs housed in individual card wallets that sport original artwork by Arvinda Gray.
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 130. EVERGREEN
Rob Haskins, Part II
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:34
1
Aug. 3, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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