Last week Laura Kuhn talked with Rob Haskins, an American musicologist, critic, performer, and old friend who serves as a Professor of Music at the University of New Hampshire, having joined the faculty in 2004. Haskins has written extensively about John Cage, and we spent virtually all of our time talking about his Anarchic Societies of Sounds: The Number Pieces of John Cage, a re-working of his doctoral dissertation published in 2009 by VDM Verlag, the first book devoted to the subject of Cage’s last series of works, the so-called “number pieces,” distinguished by their number titles and making use of Cage’s late-life, groundbreaking time-bracket notation. We chatted at such length, in fact, that we had no time at all for music, so this week we make up for it by simply listening to two works from the extraordinary 4-CD box set from Another Timbre (at178x4) entitled John Cage Number Pieces (2021). We listen first to Ten (1991), scored for violin, piano, cello, oboe, flute, viola, percussion, violin, clarinet, and trombone, in its entirety, followed by a lengthy excerpt from Eight (1991), scored for brass and woodwind instruments. These are subtle, sublime pieces, performed with meticulous attention and care by the celebrated ensemble Apartment House, just two from the total of 16 works that are featured on this box set. The set also includes a 44-page booklet containing extensive liner notes by Simon Reynell alongside the CDs housed in individual card wallets that sport original artwork by Arvinda Gray.

"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!