"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.
Today on All Things Cage Kuhn shares a special recording from the archives of the John Cage Trust " a live performance of Cages Lecture on the Weather (1975), directed by Kuhn, produced by Bard College and the John Cage Trust, and presented at Bard Colleges Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The date was Sept. 28, 2007, and the work was performed twice in commemoration of the John Cage Trusts having gone into residential placement at Bard College just months before. The cast was stellar: John Ashbery, Leon Botstein, KC Brazeau, Merce Cunningham, Sage Fuller Cowles, Ari Fenton, Daniel Fishkin, John Kelly, Garry Kvistad, Robert Martin, Shawn Patrick Moore, Mikel Rouse, John Ralston Saul, Tristan Shepherd, Richard Teitelbaum, and Zeke Virant. Joan Retallack, long on faculty at Bard College, served as dramaturg.
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 072. EVERGREEN.
John Cages "Lecture on the Weather"
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:34
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June 9, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.