This week on “All Things Cage,” on the heels of attending stunning performances of John Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4 (1990) given by the Detroit Opera, directed by Yuval Sharon, Kuhn returns with renewed interest to Cage’s vocal works with a program of pieces drawn from the 1998 Harmonia Mundi CD (HM-57) entitled Theatre of Voices Litany for the Whale, John Cage and Paul Hillier, with Terry Riley. The focus is on two works from this CD – Litany for the Whale (1980) and 36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp (1970) – but also included at program’s end is the ensemble’s performance of Cage’s celebrated Aria (1958), which was premiered by the celebrated soprano Cathy Berberian in Rome on Jan. 5, 1959.
https://theatreofvoices.com/

"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!