"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 Lawrence Voytek, who, for 25 years, served as studio assistant to the celebrated American artist and one of John Cages closest friends, Robert Rauschenberg. Lawrence is not a trained musician, but an inspired one, taking his lead from Cage in his interest in noise and its place in performance. He plays regularly with fellow musicians Kat Epple and Laurence Getford in the band Sonic Combine, AKA The Robert Rauschenberg Studio House Band, but tonight well listen to an excerpt from another of his endeavors, Strategic Structures, a name given to both a series of musical metal sculptures built by Voytek and spontaneous compositions that arose out of a 1989 jam session utilizing these instruments performed by Epple, Bob Stohl, and Robert Rauschenberg himself. The setting was Rauschenbergs Beach House on idyllic Captiva Island, and, as Epple recounts, this was a magical night, an inspired collaboration, and an exhilarating setting.
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 084. EVERGREEN.
Lawrence Voytek
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:50
1
Sept. 1, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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