The international recording, touring, and guitar virtuoso Aaron Larget-Caplan was Laura Kuhn’s second guest on All Things Cage on January 9, 2021, and soon after he was asking for an ex post facto quid pro quo: doing another program together, but with their roles reversed. With Larget-Caplan at the helm, their resulting conversation is almost entirely about Kuhn and her 30+ year journey with Cage, but Kuhn closes the program with a lengthy excerpt by Cage himself lifted from his first public performance of his Overpopulation and Art (1992) at Stanford University.

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!