In January of 2021, I spent a wonderful and intense week researching ROZART MIX at the John Cage Trust at Bard College.  It was the first place I had visited during the pandemic.  On Oct. 23, with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese, I presented a 6-hour performance of ROZART MIX at the John Cage Trust.   Six hours of 12 individually amplified reel-to-reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices, created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound.  The performance culminated with John Wiese touching a frog for the first time as the final sound croaked through the speakers.  The frog contact was just one of many magical moments that occurred during the preparation and presentation of the piece.  I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed performing it.  Special thanks to Galen Joseph-Hunter of Wave Farm and Laura Kuhn & Emy Martin of the John Cage Trust for trusting me with this material. - Aaron Dilloway, May 2024

"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 you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, 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.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!