Laura Kuhn talks with Emanuel Dimas di Melo Pimenta, a true Renaissance man who has functioned throughout his lengthy career as a composer, architect, urban planner, photographer, and writer. He hails from Sao Paolo, Brazil, and was introduced to John Cage in 1985 by none other than Augusto de Campos, co-founder with his brother Haroldo of the Concrete poetry movement in Brazil, at the Biennale de Sao Paulo, where both were giving concerts. Pimenta became a commissioned composer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, producing compositions that were used for three of Cunningham’s works – Fabrications (1987), Trackers (1991), and Windows (1995). We talk about his various endeavors, including a little-known conversation he had with his good friend Ornette Coleman on the subject of John Cage. The audio excerpt we’ll listen to at the close of tonight’s program is from Emanuel’s last work for Cunningham which he presented as a gift to the choreographer on the occasion of his 90th birthday: Reed (2009), in a version for transverse flute and saxophone and performed by Pimenta on flute and Paul Goldberg on sax.

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!