Tonight’s “All Things Cage” features a “documentary-fantasy” entitled “Arnold Schoenberg: The First Hundred Years,” produced in 1975 for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by the celebrated Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould. For this broadcast, Gould separately interviewed the French musicologist and Gustav Mahler biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, composers John Cage and Ernst Krenek, conductor Erich Leinsdorf, and conductor-musicologist Denis Stevens about Schoenberg, his compositions, his impact on the future of music. Gould matched up fragments from each of the interviews with other conversational fragments or appropriate musical accompaniment, balancing voice and musical levels, carefully fading the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet into the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony using the note G as a pivot. A few days later, in his office in downtown Toronto, Gould and engineer Don Logan pulled the proper switches to transform De La Grange, Cage, Krenek, Leinsdorf, and Stevens into the “actors” in his hour-long drama about the musical life of Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Schoenberg for a time in Los Angeles, and he remained faithful to him to the end of his life.

This aural landscape is an example of what Gould called “contrapuntal radio” – a concept resulting in radio that is experientially comparable to sitting on the IRT during rush hour, reading a newspaper while picking up snatches of two or three conversations as a portable radio blasts in the background and the car rattles down the track. In the ten years after his retirement at the unlikely age of 32, Glenn Gould led a most unretiring existence in Toronto, creating contrapuntal radio documentaries; producing television programs, writing book reviews and magazine articles; conducting “self” interviews (“Glenn Gould Interviews Himself About Beethoven"); transcribing orchestral works for the piano; acting in commercials; and making records for Columbia (over 30 disks).

-- --text adapted from Robert Hurwitz, “The Glenn Gould Contrapuntal Radio Show”, The New York Times Archives, January 5, 1975

"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!