"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 Kuhn returns to the subject of John Cages All Ricerca del Silenzio Perduto (1978), familiarly known as Il Treno, by reading a piece written by Martin Friedman about his attendance at the inaugural performance of Cages composition in Bologna, June 26-28, 1978. Friedman, who died in 2016, was an American museum curator well known as the long-time director of the Walker Art Center. Friedman sent Kuhn this piece, which hed entitled Il Treno di John Cage, not long before he died, both to place in the archives of the John Cage Trust but also looking for a publisher. She cautioned him that it was too short to stand alone and offered to publish it on the John Cage Trusts website, johncage.org. He declined, choosing to continue searching. Kuhn was happy to learn recently that the piece has since been published at the Walker Art Centers own website, walkerart.org, as the sixth installment of its ongoing series Art (re)Collecting. This is a beautiful recollection of Friedmans 1978 trip to Bologna to witness Il Treno, and hence serves as a beautiful introduction to the extended excerpt we listen to in the second half of the program. This recording is drawn from one of the CDs contained in a stunning bilingual book by Baskerville Art Books in Bologna, published in 2008 simply as Alla Ricerca del Silenzio Perduto " Il Treno di John Cage.
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 145. EVERGREEN
Martin Friedman and "Il Treno di John Cage"
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:56:47
1
Nov. 23, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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