Laura Kuhn talks this week with Larry List, a New York-based curator and artist who’s been engaged for years with artists and composers whose works and lives have involved chess. They talk primarily about List’s “The Imagery of Chess Revisited,” an exhibition that recreated a show that originally took place at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York City in 1944, which in its re-creation took place at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, in 2005-2006; most of the original artists were featured, including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Motherwell, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, and others, including Cage’s wife at the time, Xenia.

Cage’s contribution to the 1944 Levy Gallery show was a work made especially for it – Chess Pieces – originally conceived as an ink-and-goache piece that contained black and white music notation that filled an array of squares on a 19 x 19” Masonite board. In List’s preparatory work, he managed to locate, borrow, and then closely examine virtually all of the works from the original show. Soliciting the expertise of the well-known Cage pianist, Margaret Leng Tan, it was discovered that Cage’s Chess Pieces was not only a compelling visual artwork but also a coherent musical composition: a through-composed score, consisting of 22 systems of music read conventionally from left to right. Leng Tan subsequently recorded the work and thus Chess Pieces was both exhibited and first heard at “The Imagery of Chess Revisited” exhibition. As Leng Tan rightly observed, “Chess Pieces stands at the confluences of three of John Cage's primary life-long interests: music, visual arts and chess."

The original score, as visual artwork, remains in a private collection in Chicago; the transcription made by Leng Tan for solo piano is available from Cage’s music publisher, C.F. Peters (EP68110). We listen tonight to Leng Tan performing Chess Pieces as released on Mode Records 158, John Cage: Volume 34, The Piano Works 7, released in 2006.

"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!

Photograph of Larry List © Kathy Grove.