"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 speaks tonight with Joan Retallack, an extraordinary American poet, essayist, and scholar who also happens to be her colleague at Bard College. As the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor (Emerita) of Humanities, Joan taught courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts, and she was long the director of Bards Language & Thinking Program. She is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, Palestine. Joan has read and performed throughout the world, and her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009 her work was the subject of a two-day conference at Cambridge University, where she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture. In 1996 she received the American Award in Belles-Lettres for her marvelous ,MUSICAGE: Cages Muses on Words * Art * Music: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, which has long been in Kuhns top three recommended books on John Cage. Her most recent volume of poetry " Boschd: Fables, Moral Tales and Other Awkward Constructions " came out last year from Litmus Press. We listen at the close of tonights program to a lengthy excerpt from Cages Hymns and Variations (1979), Cages beautiful and largest choral work, from Mode Records CD 71 (1998), performed by the extraordinary vocal ensemble Ars Nova, conducted by Toms Vet.
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 041. EVERGREEN
Joan Retallack
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:57
1
Nov. 4, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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