Laura Kuhn talks with artist Richard Kraft about the John Cage/Morton Feldman “Radio Happenings,” five programs that were aired on New York City’s WBAI between July 1966 and January 1967. These Radio Happenings were published in 2015 in a beautiful bi- lingual edition (English and German) collaboratively produced by Gisela Gronemeyer of MusikTexte in Cologne and Brian Brandt of Mode Records, now here in the Hudson Valley, an edition that includes a DVD that contains digitally-remastered recordings of all five programs. Both Kraft and Kuhn love these conversations, revealing as they do something of the day-to-day lives and thoughts of two rising musical luminaries of the time who were also extremely close friends. We listen to a bit of Radio Happening I at both the start and finish of the program.

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!