The parallels between Balinese gamelan and certain works by John Cage – especially the ones of the 'prepared piano' period – seem obvious to many, including John Noise Manis, who, together with Andrew McGraw, embarked on producing the recording we’ll listen to this evening, Gamelan Cage (Sanggar Ceraken of Bali), with a purposely put together gamelan orchestra led by I Madé Subandi.  These recordings were made on July 29-30, 2012, at the Purnati Center for the Arts, performed by Bali Gamelan Ceraken - I Madé Subandi, director, and were released in 2013 on the artist-led, UK-based Sargasso label, scd 28075, with a booklet of liner notes that describe the preparatory and recording processes.  The works by John Cage included on this beautiful recording are Bacchanale (1940), Primitive (1942), Tossed as it is Untroubled (1943), Prelude for Meditation (1944), The Unavailable Memory of (1944), Mysterious Adventure (1945), Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (1945), Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947), and Sonata V, from Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946-48).

"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!