"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 Kuhn talks with Los Angeles and Hudson Valley-based artist Richard Kraft about his new book " or, properly, books " titled It Is What It is: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017-January 2021 (Siglio Press, 2020). By way of introduction to both Kraft and his latest work, Kuhn begins the program by reading Leah Ollmans excellent review, A real-time diary thats a dazzling testament to its subjects basic incomprehensibility, which appeared in The Brooklyn Rails Dec. 21-Jan. 22, 2021 issue. Kraft speaks a bit about Cages role in the creation of It Is What It Is in his own introduction to the 5-volume slipcase set: having seen/heard an installation of Cages Lecture on the Weather with his partner Lisa Pearson, publisher-in-chief of Siglio Press, at the Frith Gallery in London the day after Trumps election, Kraft felt a most welcome call-to-action that prompted a stunning response. Cages Preface to Lecture on the Weather is heard at the close of the program.
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 133. EVERGREEN
Richard Kraft
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:09
1
Aug. 24, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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