On this the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Kuhn speaks to John Cage’s aspirational thinking and his incredible prescience, both captured beautifully in two text works we’ll listen to tonight: we open with Cage’s reading of his “Preface” from Lecture on the Weather (1975) and close with his lesser-known adolescent Other People Think (1927), which he delivered representing Los Angeles High School at the Southern California Oratorical Society at the Hollywood Bowl in his native Los Angeles. Both are testimony, if such is needed, to Cage’s prescience and his compassionate sensibilities. We close with a snippet from his Second Construction (1940), composed at the start of World War 2, when Cage was grappling with a heavy heart about what it means to be a composer during deeply troubling times.

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!