Mikel Rouse is a New York-based composer, director, performer, and recording artist who was hailed by the NY Times as “a composer many believe to be the best of his generation.” His works include more than two dozen records, 7 films, and a trilogy of media operas: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End Of Cinematics.   Rouse premiered and directed the first in the trilogy, Failing Kansas, inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which led to an emerging art form he calls "counterpoetry," which involves the use of multiple unpitched voices in counterpoint. In 1996 Mr. Rouse premiered and directed the second in the trilogy, the modern talk show opera Dennis Cleveland, hailed by The Village Voice as "the most exciting and innovative new opera since Einstein on the Beach".

The third opera in the trilogy, The End Of Cinematics, premiered at the Krannert Center for the performing Arts in Fall 2005. In fall 2006, Rouse embarked on a major tour of this work, with stops at the Carolina Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the University of Florida at Gainesville, Liverpool, and the Carnival Center in Miami.

Rouse has also operated on a more intimate scale as a solo live performer, traversing the globe like a 21st-century Mark Twain with a surreally beautiful song-and-video storytelling piece called Music For Minorities.

Rouse has been closely associated with the John Cage Trust for over 20 years. Kuhn and Rouse speak about their various projects together, and close their conversation with a few words about the 2006 piece he conceived for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, International Cloud Atlas, which was scored for multiple iPods set to “shuffle” so that each audience member would have a different realization of the score to listen to while watching the dance on stage, Cunningham’s EyeSpace. Says Rouse, “The sequence of tracks on his recording represents but one version of the composition. As with the dance performance, the sequence may be set to “shuffle” to yield a possible 3,628,800 permutations.” Rouse’s music was released on iTunes and then made available for download prior to the performance. We close tonight’s program by listening to two songs from the CD: Quando Este Lado Esta Vazio and My Love’s Gone Remix.

Mikel Rouse’s music is available at iTunes, Bandcamp, and CD Baby.

"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!

Photo of Mikel Rouse ©Eric Calvy.