Laura Kuhn talks with Stuart Isacoff, who’s been active across North America and Europe as a writer, pianist, composer, and lecturer. His presence in the cultural landscape over the past decades has included presentations at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center, as well as at festivals around the world. He also makes regular contributions on music and art to The Wall Street Journal, his most recent piece being “The Sounds of Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” was no compositional prank, but a deep exploration of the very nature of music and the beautiful chaos of life” (Nov. 5, 2021). Until 2014, he was on the faculty of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music and the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance (SUNY).

Write's Kuhn: "Stuart and I began our relationship as we begin this talk, on and around the subject of the Russian enfant terrible of musicology and lexicography, Nicholas Slonimsky, with whom I worked during my graduate school days at U.C.L.A. and to whom Isacoff has had lifelong devotion. We also talk about his four marvelous books with Knopf, his fourth and most recent, Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed, scheduled for publication in May 2022."

"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!