Laura Kuhn talks with Robert Worby, a London-based composer, performer, and broadcaster. His works cross many boundaries and are created for many different situations including gallery spaces and the Internet. He has made several realizations of works by John Cage including Fontana Mix (using Cage’s original tapes), Cartridge Music, and the Variations pieces. In 1989 he worked with Cage on a realization of the composer’s Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and in 2009 he conducted Imaginary Landscape No. 4 at the Tate Britain. Most recently he performed with the Langham Research Centre ensemble (Felix Carey, Iain Chambers, Philip Tagney, and Robert Worby), Britain’s leading musique concrète performing group, in London, at both the Barbican and at Café Oto. On the program was Cage’s Variations I, which has become something of a favorite set piece for the ensemble. Worby and Kuhn also performed Cage’s Indeterminacy stories together at Victoria Miguel’s reenactment of John Cage’s Mewantemoosiecday at the Glasgow School of Art in 2019.

Worby is currently the presenter on BBC’s “Hear and Now.” Among his recent programs is “Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen, and Japan.”

For his CD John Cage Song Books (Solos for Voice 3-92) (Sub Rosa, 2012), which contains pieces of four kinds (songs, songs with electronics, directions for a theatrical performance, and directions for a theatrical performance with electronics), collaborating with composer, performer, and conductor Gregory Rose and performer, director, and composer Loré Lixenberg, all of the Solos comprising Cage’s work were recorded and manipulated for the CD, leaving some (14) on their own and superimposing others to create 7 “mixes.” This is the first CD released that includes all of the Solos for Voice comprising Song Books. We listen to three this evening: Solo for Voice No. 4, Solo for Voice No. 21, and Solo for Voice No. 90. Gorgeous!

"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!