"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.
All Things Cage continues its break from its usual conversational format to allow for an introductory program that examines Cages interest in the circus as a compositional tool and form, with emphasis on how it appeared in both his very first Musicircus in 1967 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and in his late-life composition for museum, Rolywholyover A Circus, composed on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it was first seen in 1993, one year after Cages death. This is an introductory program in the sense that Kuhn and Julie Lazar, founding curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and collaborator with Cage on Rolywholyover A Circus , will speak next week on All Things Cage about Cages influence on their respective lives, both then and now, some 28 years later.
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 113. EVERGREEN
Cage's Interest in the "Circus" as a Compositional Strategy
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:54
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March 30, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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