"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.
This week Laura Kuhn talks with Rob Haskins, an American musicologist, critic, performer, and old friend who holds degrees in musicology and harpsichord performance from the University of Rochester Eastman School of Music. In 2004 he joined the University of New Hampshire, where he is currently Professor of Music. In 2012 he acted as musical director and performer for a new production of Cages Song Books at the Holland Festival with the new-music group Alarm Will Sound. Hes also written extensively about John Cage, including the book John Cage (Reaktion, 2012) and John Cage and Recorded Sound: A Discographical Essay, published by the Music Library Association, Vol. 67, Number 2, in December 2010, and available, along with several other of his writings, at Project MUSE online. Haskins also authored Classical Listening: Two Decades of Reviews from the American Record Guide (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). This evening we focus on his Anarchic Societies of Sounds: The Number Pieces of John Cage, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation published in 2009 by VDM Verlag; this is the first-ever book devoted to the subject of Cages last series of works, the so-called number pieces, distinguished by their number titles and making use of Cages late-life, groundbreaking time-bracket notation.
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 129. EVERGREEN
Rob Haskins, Part I
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:19
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July 27, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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