This week’s program will once again be a conversation between Laura Kuhn and Robert Worby, a composer, sound artist, and broadcaster based in London. Worby was Kuhn’s guest last week, and they focused entirely on his work with Loré Lixenberg and Gregory Rose that resulted in the beautiful 2012 Sub Rosa CD, John Cage Song Books (Solos for Voice 3-92). This week Kuhn and Worby focus on Worby’s work with Felix Carey, Iain Chambers, and Philip Tagney, fellow members of the ensemble known as the Langham Research Centre, resulting in the 2014 Sub Rosa recording entitled John Cage Early Electronic and Tape Pieces, which comprises Cage’s Fontana Mix with Aria (1958), Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952), WBAI (1960), Cartridge Music (1960), 0’00” (4’33” No. 2) (1962), and Variations I (1958) – amazing stuff!

"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!

Pictured above: John Cage ©Marian Kalter.