"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's program features a recorded program that was created for the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in London, Salzburg, and Paris, which was heard successively from November 28, 2018 to November 16, 2019 to accompany a showing of John Cages Ryoanji drawings, graphite pencil rock tracing works on handwoven paper that date from the early 1980s and that collectively speak to the artists devotion to the famous Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. The recording well hear is a composite looping of portions of Cages various musical works entitled Ryoanji: Solos for Oboe, Flute, Contrabass, Voice, Trombone with Percussion or Orchestral Obbligato (1983-85) which were drawn from 15 different recordings involving performers from all over the world. Cage dedicated each of his five distinct scores to the premiere performers of the works: Jolle Landre (double bass), Robert Aitkin (flute), James Fulkerson (trombone), Isabelle Ganz (voice), and Michael Pugliese (percussion), all of whom are heard in the present mix. The Galerie Thaddeus Ropac exhibition was simple and beautiful, the Ely House in London perhaps the most perfect place Id ever visited wherein Cages exquisite and peaceful drawings were shown. The exhibition was curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, and the design of the audio portion was overseen by Victoria Miguel. Also noteworthy is the elegant little exhibition booklet, compiled and written in the main by James Pritchett.
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 131. EVERGREEN
John Cage's Ryoanji Works at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:39
1
Aug. 10, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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