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Laura Kuhn speaks with 40-year-old music historian Brent Reidy who was recently named director of the research libraries of the New York Public Library. This put him at the helm of four vast public research centers – the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center – with hundreds of employees and with roughly 47 million items within their combined collections. John Cage’s “Music Manuscript Collection” is a jewel within the holdings of the Performing Arts Library, of course, which Reidy visits weekly. As he told Dan Bilefsky, who broke the news of his appointment in The New York Times on 12/29/22, these intermittent pilgrimages to visit with John Cage help him to “de-stress.” At the close of the program, at Reidy’s request, we listen to Stephen Drury performing Cage’s Dream (1948), released by Catalyst (CD 09026 61980 2) in 1994.

"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!