"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.
Today on All Things Cage well listen to John Cage reading a lengthy excerpt from his Communication, one of the three lectures he performed in Darmstadt, along with Indeterminacy and Changes, in 1958. This recording is the only one of the three lectures held in audio form in the Darmstadt archives; sadly, it is incomplete, missing its first few minutes, but Ill simply read the beginning of Communication before we settle into Cages reading, which will pick up where I leave off. This is the best recording we have of this work at the John Cage Trust, which was recorded on Sept. 9, 1958, in Darmstadt, with pianist David Tudor, who performs simultaneously and in interpolations from Christian Wolffs For Piano with Preparations (from 1957) and from Bo Nilssons Quantitaten (from 1958). Cages first appearance in Darmstadt was a red-letter event in the history of music, and as one critic wrote, with his three lectures, Cage cracked open the little world of contemporary music, sowing the seeds for a rich, burgeoning, heterogeneous landscape of sound with many different concepts of what music is and can be. - Laura Kuhn
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 148. EVERGREEN
John Cage performing "Communication"
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:34
1
Dec. 15, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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