"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 talks with curator Julie Lazar, best known in Cage circles for her collaborative work with John Cage on his composition for museum, Rolywholyover; A Circus, composed on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Lazar was a founding curator and where it was first seen in 1993, one year after Cages death. Last weeks program focused on Cages interest in the circus as a compositional strategy, which expressed itself in works that cross some 25 years. We listened to a lengthy excerpt from his first "Musicircus" (1968), after which Kuhn then spoke about the concept of the circus as applied to Rolywholyover, closing with Klaus Schnings beautiful just to rolywholyover: in memoriam john cage, produced for MoCAs The Territory of Art radio series.
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.
Julie Lazar
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:10
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June 24, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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