"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 Tom Moore, a renowned interpreter of Cages music, and especially the composers post-1951 works for solo piano and chamber music. Tom first met John Cage in 1982, and theirs turned into a long and happy relationship. As Cage remarked in 1990, I am delighted that Thomas Moore plays my music, studies and thinks, writes and talks about it. He is an excellent musician, one in whom I have confidence and whose work I enjoy.
Kuhn had the good fortune to hear Tom perform a program of Cages music, which included Cages Haikus (1950-1951), at the 12th Annual ReVIEWING Black Mountain College International Conference that took place in Asheville, North Carolina last month under the auspices of the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center. Its a charming piece, one that was composed in the period when Cage and Cunningham were spending nearly every summer at Black Mountain College. Its also not a well-known work, which led to the idea to have Tom Moore join Laura Kuhn for a conversation on All Things Cage. Tom not only agreed, but he also agreed to make a new recording of Cages Haikus for us to listen to at the end of tonights program. To bookend the program, Kuhns added an excerpt at the start of the program of Toms beautiful performance of Etude I from Cages Etudes Australes (1974-1975).
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 139. EVERGREEN
Tom Moore
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:05
1
Oct. 12, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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