Russell Hartenberger and Garry Kvistad are long-time members of NEXUS, a quartet of master percussionists internationally revered for virtuosity and innovation and for making extraordinary music with the broadest array of percussion instruments imaginable. The ensemble is recognized quite simply as one of the most influential percussion ensembles to have emerged in the post-war period. NEXUS has participated in several Cage programs at Bard College since the John Cage Trust joined its ranks in 2007: the first “John Cage at Bard College Symposium” in 2009, where they were joined by Jason Treuting of So Percussion and Bard College’s own Frank Corliss, and again in 2012, Cage’s Centennial Year, when they performed in an amazing staged performance of the John Cage/Kenneth Patchen 1942 CBS radio play, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, in a program entitled “John Cage: On & Off the Air.” And in 2014, Garry Kvistad, a long-time resident of New York’s Hudson Valley, graced us with a stunning solo performance of Cage’s 27’ 10.554 for a percussionist (1956), appearing within a chance-determined musical collage of five related works Cage composed between 1953 and 1956, in a program entitled “The Ten Thousand Things.”

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!